Alexander Fleming: biography and contributions of this British doctor

Of all the medical discoveries that the 20th century gave us, penicillin is probably the most practical and the most important. Also the most anecdotal as it was discovered by pure chance, thanks to an accident resulting from a mistake by a doctor and microbiologist named Alexander Fleming.

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

Next we will 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.

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Short biography Alexander Fleming

Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist known worldwide for his discovery of the properties of penicillin

, substance released by a common fungus. This advance was crucial for the history of medicine of the last century since, despite having multiple findings made throughout Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were still many pathogenic diseases that resisted the therapeutic methods of the moment.

Among the great advances made by medicine and biology in the nineteenth century we have the establishment of the microbial origin of infectious diseases, thanks to the figures of scientists such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. However, despite efforts to develop vaccines, many infectious diseases remained having fatal effects in most cases, and the means to combat them were lacking once they were contracted.

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

Early years

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

When Alexander Fleming was thirteen years old, he went to live in London with his half-brother Thomas, who practiced there as a doctor. Fleming completed his education with two courses taken at the Polytechnic Institute on Regent Street, later working in the offices of a shipping company.

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Medical studies and military service

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

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

In 1901, at the age of twenty, he inherited a small legacy from his uncle John Fleming that served him to study medicine. Subsequently, he was awarded a scholarship to St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington, an institution with which he would end up maintaining a life-long relationship. In 1906 he graduated from medicine and surgery, and joined the team of bacteriologist Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccines and immunology, with whom he became associated for forty years.

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

Appointed professor of bacteriology, in 1928 he would become a professor and retire as emeritus professor in 1948, although he came to occupy the direction of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Microbiology until 1954, an institution founded in his honor and that of his former teacher and colleague of research.

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First antibacterial findings

Fleming he dedicated his professional life to researching the human body's defenses against bacterial infections, task that caused his name to end up being associated with two great discoveries in that area: lysozyme and penicillin. While lysozyme is remarkable, it is its discovery of penicillin that has made the name of Alexander Fleming has gone down in history as it is the most important from a point of view practical.

Fleming he discovered lysozyme in 1922 by observing that nasal discharge, tears, and saliva had the ability to dissolve certain types of bacteria, acting as a barrier against infection. He later proved that that ability depended on an active enzyme, lysozyme, which is found in many body tissues. His discovery revealed something revolutionary for its time as it showed that there were substances that, for one On the other hand, they were harmless to the cells of the body, but on the other hand, they were lethal to bacteria. pathogens.

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Penicillin: the accident that saved millions of lives

The discovery of penicillin, one of the most important medical discoveries of the 20th century, happened serendipitously, accidentally. On September 28, 1928, Alezander Fleming, who was returning from vacation, would make an astonishing discovery thanks, in part, to having lost his way and not having the laboratory very well organized.

At that time he was doing a study on the mutations of certain staph colonies and he saw that one of his cultures had been accidentally contaminated by a microorganism 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 were it not for the fact that Fleming, full of curiosity and amazement, perceived the behavior of the crop as strange. He saw that the area where the contamination had occurred the staph had become transparent, something that Fleming interpreted as the effect that the fungus had an antibacterial substance and that this had weakened the bacterial culture.

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

"Sometimes you find what you are not looking for. When I woke up just after sunrise on September 28, 1928, I was certainly not planning revolutionize all medicines by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or the killer of bacteria But I guess that's exactly what I did. "

As he experimented with it, Fleming knew how 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 seeing what was 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, checking that it was safe for animals. leukocytes, which led him to the conclusion that this substance had a reliable index that it was harmless to animal cells. Fleming observed that this substance, even diluted, had an antibacterial power far superior to that of powerful 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 he did not arouse much interest in that moment. Although Fleming understood from the beginning the importance of the antibacterial power of penicillin, this it still took about fifteen years to become the universally used therapeutic agent that would eventually become.

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Last years and death

One of the reasons penicillin was not so popular right away has to do with its purification process being excessively difficult for chemical techniques at the time. Fortunately, this was solved thanks to research carried out at Oxford by the team of Australian pathologist Howard Florey and German chemist Ernst B. Chain, who in 1939 got 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 for this type of research, which made By 1944, all the seriously wounded from the famous and crucial Battle of Normandy could be treated with penicillin.

Thanks to this, Alexander Fleming managed to achieve the fame he so deserved, albeit with some delay. In 1942 he had already been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and would receive the title of Sir two years later. In 1945 he shared with Florey and Chain the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.. In 1946 he received the Gold Medal of Honor from 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 passed away, and Alexander Fleming would remarry in 1953, this time to a Greek doctor named Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas. In 1951 he was appointed rector of the University of Edinburgh.

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