Alexander Fleming: biography and contributions of this British physician.

A summary of the life and career of Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin.

Of all the discoveries in medicine that the 20th century gave us, penicillin is probably the most practical and the most important. It is also the most anecdotal because it was discovered by pure chance, thanks to an accident resulting from an oversight by a physician and microbiologist named Alexander Fleming.

Fleming and his penicillin is considered by many to be the most important serendipitous discovery in history, and rightly so, because thanks to him we have one of the most efficient and recurrent antibiotics for human use.

We will now learn about the life of this we are going to learn about the life of this researcher through a biography of Alexander Fleming.in which we will see how he discovered that the broth of a fungus fought certain bacteria and the importance that this meant for his time, especially with the arrival of the Second World War.

Brief biography Alexander Fleming

Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist known worldwide for his discovery of the properties of penicillin, a substance released by a fungus.penicillin, a substance released by a common fungus. This breakthrough was crucial for the history of medicine in the last century because, despite the many discoveries made throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were still many pathogenic diseases that resisted the therapeutic methods of the time.

Among the great advances made by medicine and biology in the 19th century was the establishment of the microbial origin of infectious diseases, thanks to scientists such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. However, despite the efforts put into the development of vaccines, many infectious diseases continued to have fatal effects in most cases, and there was a lack of means to combat them once they were contracted.

This is why penicillin turned out to be so important, as it was capable of destroying pathogenic germs. it was capable of destroying pathogenic germs without harming the organism.It was a biological antiseptic that was respectful of the human body. The substance discovered by Fleming not only saved millions of lives, but also revolutionized therapeutic methods, ushering in the era of antibiotics and, consequently, the establishment of modern medicine.

Early years

Alexander Fleming was born on August 6, 1881 near Darvel, East Ayrshire, Scotland, into a farming family engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry.He was the third of four children of his father Hugh Fleming's second marriage to his mother Grace Stirling Morton. He was the third of four children from his father Hugh Fleming's second marriage to his mother Grace Stirling Morton. His father died when Alexander was only seven years old, leaving his widowed mother to care for the family farm with the help of one of his stepsons.

On his thirteenth birthday, Alexander Fleming went to live in London with his half-brother Thomas, who was a practicing physician there. Fleming completed his education with two courses at the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street, later working in the offices of a shipping company.

Medical studies and military service

In 1900 Fleming enlisted in the London Scottish Regiment to participate in the Second Boer War (1899-1902), but the conflict ended before his unit embarked and he did not participate in the battle. (1899-1902), but the conflict ended before his unit arrived to embark and he did not participate in the battle.

However, his taste for military life led him to remain in that regiment, taking part in World War I as an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France. He was also part of the rifle unit of the Medical School.

In 1901, at the age of 20, he inherited a small bequest from his uncle, he inherited a small bequest from his uncle John Fleming which he used to study medicine.. Subsequently, he was awarded a scholarship to St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington, an institution with which he was to have a lifelong relationship. In 1906 he graduated in medicine and surgery, and became a member of the team of bacteriologist Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccines and immunology, with whom he was associated for forty years.

Fleming was an extraordinary student, and proof of this is that he was awarded the gold medal of the University of London in 1908.. A few years later, in 1914, he began teaching at St. Mary's in London and, a year later, he married Sarah Marion McElroy, an Irish nurse with whom he had his eldest son Robert Fleming.

Appointed professor of bacteriology, he became a professor in 1928 and retired as professor emeritus in 1948, although he became director of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Microbiology until 1954, an institution founded in his honor and that of his former teacher and research partner.

First Antibacterial findings

Fleming dedicated his professional life to the investigation of the human body's defenses against bacterial infections, The task that led to his name being associated with two major discoveries in this area: lysozyme and penicillin. Although lysozyme is remarkable, it is his discovery of penicillin that has made Alexander Fleming's name go down in history as the most important from a practical point of view.

Fleming discovered lysozyme in 1922 when he observed that nasal secretions, tears and saliva had the ability to dissolve certain types of bacteria, acting as a barrier against bacteria.acting as a barrier against infection. He later proved that this ability depended on an active enzyme, lysozyme, found in many body tissues. His discovery revealed something revolutionary for his time as it showed that there were substances that, on the one hand, were harmless to the cells of the organism but, on the other hand, were lethal to pathogenic bacteria.

Penicillin: the accident that saved millions of lives.

The discovery of penicillin, one of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century, occurred serendipitously, by accident. On September 28, 1928, Alezander Fleming, who was returning from vacation, would make an astonishing discovery thanks, in part, to having lost his mind and not having his laboratory very well organized.

At that time he was doing a study on the mutations of certain staphylococcal colonies and saw that one of his cultures had been accidentally contaminated by a microorganism coming from the outside air, a fungus that he would later identify as Penicillium notatum.

This would have remained a mere anecdote resulting from a certain disorganization if it were not for the fact that Fleming, full of curiosity and amazement, perceived the behavior of the culture as strange. He saw that the area where the contamination had occurred the staphylococci had become transparentFleming interpreted this as the effect that the fungus had an antibacterial substance and that this had weakened the bacterial culture.

About this amazing finding Alexander Fleming himself would say the following:

"Sometimes one finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly did not plan to revolutionize all medicines by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that's exactly what I did."

As he experimented with it, Fleming was able to take advantage of it despite the limited resources of his laboratory at the time.. He was able to observe that a pure culture broth of the fungus acquired, in a matter of a few days, a high level of antibacterial activity. He carried out several experiments focused on the degree of susceptibility to the broth of various types of pathogenic bacteria, observing that many of these pathogens were rapidly destroyed by the action of penicillin.

Later, he injected the culture into rabbits and mice, finding that it was harmless to leukocytes, which led him to the conclusion that this substance possessed a reliable index that it was harmless to animal cells. Fleming observed that this substance, even when diluted, possessed an antibacterial power far superior to that of potent antiseptics such as carbolic acid.

About eight months after his first observations, Fleming published the results in a memoir that is now considered a classic in bacteriology, although it did not arouse much interest at the time. Although Fleming understood early on the importance of the antibacterial power of penicillin, it still took about fifteen years for it to become the main antibacterial agent. took about fifteen years before it became the universally used therapeutic agent that it was to become..

Last years and death

One of the reasons why penicillin was not so popular immediately has to do with the fact that its purification process was excessively difficult for the chemical techniques of the time. Fortunately, this was solved thanks to the research carried out in Oxford by the team of the Australian pathologist Howard Florey and the German chemist Ernst B. Chain, who in 1939 obtained a grant for the study of antimicrobial substances secreted by microorganisms.

In 1941, the first satisfactory results were obtained with human patients.. During the Second World War, resources were invested in this type of research, which meant that by 1944, all the seriously wounded from the famous and crucial battle of Normandy could be treated with penicillin.

Thanks to this, Alexander Fleming achieved the fame he so richly deserved, albeit with some delay. By 1942 he had already been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was to receive the title of Sir two years later. In 1945 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Florey and Chain.. In 1946 he received the Gold Medal of Honor of the Royal College of Surgeons and in 1948 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X, the Wise.

In 1949 his wife Sarah died, and Alexander Fleming remarried in 1953, this time to a Greek doctor named Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas. In 1951 he was appointed Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh.

After a lifetime dedicated to research and being the discoverer of the most important medical breakthrough of the 20th century, Alexander Fleming died on March 11, 1955 at his home in London of a heart attack at the age of 74. Given the great discovery he made and being indirectly responsible for saving millions of lives, his body was buried as a national hero in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral.