Alexander Fleming
Scottish physician and microbiologist who discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928.
Alexander Fleming, a physician and microbiologist, was born on 6 August 1881 at Lochfield farm near Darvel, in Ayrshire, Scotland.[1]
Quick Facts
- Born
- 6 August 1881
- Birthplace
- Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland
- Died
- 11 March 1955
- Place of death
- London, England
- Resting place
- St Paul's Cathedral
- Field
- Bacteriology, immunology
- Education
- Royal Polytechnic Institution; St Mary's Hospital Medical School
- Workplaces
- St Mary's Hospital, London
Facts from the source article.
Life and work
Fleming was the third of four children of farmer Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton.[1] He enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in 1901 and qualified with an MBBS degree with distinction in 1906.[1] In a 1917 Lancet article, he explained why antiseptics were killing more soldiers than infection itself.[2] In late 1921, he discovered lysozyme when nasal mucus inhibited bacterial growth on a contaminated agar plate.[3]
He identified the bacterium in his nasal mucus as Micrococcus lysodeikticus, later reassigned as Micrococcus luteus.[4][5] He named the antibacterial substance penicillin on 7 March 1929.[6] Fleming treated his research scholar Stuart Craddock with penicillin in January 1929, but the treatment had no effect.[7] Fleming married trained nurse Sarah Marion McElroy on 24 December 1915; after her death in 1949, he married Greek colleague Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas on 9 April 1953.[8]
What the cited sources add
The Independent obituary of Norman Heatley states that Fleming and his colleagues at St Mary's effectively gave up research on penicillin because the extract was unstable and impossible to isolate in a pure state.[9] The same source notes that only when Howard Florey and Ernst Chain decided to work on antibacterial substances in 1939 was serious research on penicillin resumed.[9] Ernst Chain had found Fleming's 1929 article about penicillin and urged Florey to investigate its properties further.[9] The obituary of Sir Edward Abraham reports that Abraham and Chain published a paper in Nature in 1940 showing the existence of penicillinase in bacteria.[10]
The same assessment notes that the Fleming strain of Micrococcus luteus has a published genome sequence.[5] An assessment by the government of Canada confirms that Fleming originally deposited the Micrococcus luteus strain ATCC 4698 as Micrococcus lysodeikticus, which he had isolated from human nasal secretions.[5]
References
- Wikipedia, "Alexander Fleming" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Mazumdar, "Fleming as Bacteriologist: Alexander Fleming", Science, 1984, p. 1140–1141 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Alexander Fleming" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Fleming, "The Physiological and Antiseptic Action of Flavine (With Some Observations on the Testing of Antiseptics)", The Lancet, September 1917, p. 341–345; Mazumdar, "Fleming as Bacteriologist: Alexander Fleming", Science, 1984, p. 1140–1141 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Alexander Fleming" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Fleming, "On a remarkable bacteriolytic element found in tissues and secretions", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 1922, p. 306–317 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Alexander Fleming" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Salton, "The properties of lysozyme and its action on micororganisms", Bacteriological Reviews, 1957, p. 82–100; Schleifer, "Taxonomic Status of Micrococcus luteus (Schroeter 1872) Cohn 1872: Correlation Between Peptidoglycan Type and Genetic Compatibility", International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology, 1972, p. 224–227; Young, "Genome Sequence of the Fleming Strain of Micrococcus luteus, a Simple Free-Living Actinobacterium", Journal of Bacteriology, 2010, p. 841–860; Canada, "Final Screening Assessment of Micrococcus luteus stra en.wikipedia.org
- Canada, "Final Screening Assessment of Micrococcus luteus strain ATCC 4698", aem, 23 February 2018. facts only, no text reused. canada.ca
- Wikipedia, "Alexander Fleming" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Diggins, "The true history of the discovery of penicillin, with refutation of the misinformation in the literature", British Journal of Biomedical Science, 1999, p. 83–93 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Alexander Fleming" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Hare, "New light on the history of penicillin", Medical History, 1982, p. 1–24; Wainwright, "The Sheffield penicillin story", Mycologist, 1987, p. 28–30; Wainwright, "Besredka's "antivirus" in relation to Fleming's initial views on the nature of penicillin", Medical History, 1990, p. 79–85; Wainwright, "The history of the therapeutic use of crude penicillin.", Medical History, 1987, p. 41–50 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Alexander Fleming" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002", The Royal Society of Edinburgh, July 2006 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- "Norman Heatley", The Independent, 23 January 2004. facts only, no text reused. independent.co.uk
- Lowe, "Obituary: Sir Edward Abraham", The Independent, 13 May 1999. facts only, no text reused. independent.co.uk
Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Alexander Fleming (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.
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