Alexander

Fleming
- Birth: 6 August 1881 (Darvel, Scotland)
- Dearths: 11 March 1955 (73 years) London,
England

He was a British physician and scientist famous for

being the discoverer of penicillin, by accidentally
observing its antibiotic effects on a bacterial culture,
was obtained from the fungus Penicillium notatum. He
was trained at the University of London, where he
would later be a professor and researcher in
bacteriology. In 1945, he was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Medicine. He also discovered the lysozyme antimicrobial enzyme. He and many of his
colleagues worked in Battleground hospitals in the West Front in France. In 1918 he returned
to St Mary's Hospital, where he was elected Professor of Bacteriology at the University of
London in 1928. In 1951 he was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh for a period of
three years.

Alexander Fleming’s two discoveries occurred in the 1920s, and although they were
accidental, they demonstrate the great ability of this Scottish doctor to observe and intuition.
He discovered the lysozyme after mucus, coming from a sneeze, fell on a Petri plaque where
a bacterial culture grew. A few days later, he noticed that the bacteria had been destroyed at
the place where the nasal fluid had been deposited. Fleming, when inspecting their crops
before destroying them, noticed that the colony of a fungus had grown spontaneously, like a
pollutant, on one of the Petri plates planted with Staphylococcus aureus. Fleming later
observed the plaques and found that the bacterial colonies around the fungus (later identified
as Penicillium notatum) were transparent due to bacterial lysis. To be more precise,
Penicillium is a mould that produces a natural substance with antibacterial effects: penicillin.

His discovery of penicillin meant a drastic change for modern medicine by starting the
so-called ‘Era of antibiotics’.