Sir Alexander Fleming Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) was one of three men who discovered and developed the

first antibiotic, penicillin. Fleming was born on a farm in Scotland and worked in a shipping company as a youth. He hated the work, however, and when he received a small inheritance from a relative, he used it to go to medical school. Initially he worked for Almroth Wright, who believed strongly in the effectiveness of vaccinations to prevent disease. But Fleming thought there might be other ways to treat infections.

During World War I (1914-1918), Fleming was further inspired by the problems of wounded soldiers. Immunizations did nothing to stop the bacterial infections which tended to attack the wound sites. Fleming was determined to find a "magic bullet" substance that could destroy these invading bacteria. In 1922, he discovered that the body actually has enzymes in tears and mucus (slimy secretions) that, though weak, can kill certain bacteria very quickly. In 1928 Fleming was still working on the properties of various bacteria when a little bit of luck led to his most important discovery. Fleming had left some microbes (bacteria samples) in dishes in his lab; he had also left the window open. Mold spores from outside landed in the dish and miraculously dissolved the bacteria. Fleming identified the mold as "Penicilliumnotatum," and he named the substance that actually killed the bacteria "penicillin." While Fleming proved that penicillin was not poisonous to animals, he did not have the means to actually synthesize (artificially create) a pure form of it to use in experiments. The practical purification of penicillin was the later achievement of Howard Walter Florey (1898-1968) and Ernst Boris Chain (19061979). Fleming, Horey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine for their combined research with penicillin. After receiving the Nobel Prize, Fleming spent the rest of his career doing research at the Wright-Fleming Institute. Because of Fleming's momentous discovery, many previously incurable diseases are now easily treated, and the average human life span has been significantly increased.

Insulin (1920s) Canadian medical scientists Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered the role of insulin, which is a pancreatic hormone that is used to treat patients with diabetes, a disease characterized by the bodys inability to metabolize blood sugar often resulting in numerous severe complications such as kidney failure, nerve damage, coma, blindness and many cardiovascular disorders. Prior to the discovery of insulin, being diagnosed with diabetes meant a slow certain death, but today, the quality of life of diabetics has dramatically improved as complications have become less common.

Frederick Banting

In 1921, Dr. Frederick Banting discovered insulin, enabling people with diabetes to live long and healthy lives. The discovery won him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1923, worldwide acclaim and (in 1934) a knighthood from the British crown. Born November 14, 1891, in Alliston, Ontario, Frederick Banting was the youngest of five children. After earning a medical degree from the University of Toronto in 1916, he joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps and served in France during the First World War, where, in 1919, he earned the Military Cross for heroism under fire. In 1920, Banting began to focus on the problem of diabetes. At that time, people with diabetes faced shortened lives, blindness and lost limbs due to their body's inability to produce insulin, a naturally occurring hormone that turns sugar into energy. Banting and Dr. Charles Best, then a medical student, working in an overheated and underfunded laboratory, conducted experiments on dogs, refining insulin samples for human use. On January 23, 1922, the researchers gave their insulin serum for the first time to a human, 14 year old Leonard Thompson, who experienced an almost instant recovery. The discovery was not a cure, but it was a treatment for a previously untreatable disease. Banting and Best did not seek a patent for their discovery, instead selling the rights to the University of Toronto for $1, as a means of ensuring that insulin could be available to all those who needed it. Oncogenes (1970s) One of the greatest advancements in the field of cancer research is the discovery of oncogenes by American doctors Harold Varmus and John Michael Bishop. Oncogenes are genes that regulate the growth and prevent DNA damage of every living cell, but if mutated or present in unusually high quantities can increase the likelihood of normal cells being converted into cancerous ones. Varmus and Bishop made their studies based on the assumption that cancerous growths do not occur as a consequence of microbial invasion but as a consequence of genetic mutations worsened by environmental factors as radiation, chemicals and viral infections. More than a dozen oncogenes in human cancer have been identified so far since the 1970s; with many new cancer treatments being formulated to target these DNA sequences gone haywire and their by-products.