Alexander Fleming Biography

Alexander Fleming (August 6, 1881 – March 11, 1955), his homeland located in Lochfield, Great Britain. His first stage of life was spent in a rural family dedicated to the cultivation and breeding of animals. His father Hugh Fleming died when Alexander was only seven years old, his mother being fortuitously left in the care of the family estate with the help of the eldest of her children. Fleming received a fairly elementary education, achieved with difficulty, however, his taste for detailed observation and tracking of objects, which emanated from his great curiosity were the key to achieving the future.

By 1894, when he was thirteen years old, he was transferred to London with a stepbrother who worked as a doctor. For four years he worked in a maritime company as an administrative one. Thanks to the money raised he completed two courses at the Polytechnic Institute of Regent Street, where he graduated with honors. In 1900 he enlisted in the London Scottish Regiment with the intention of being part of the Boer War, but it ended before his unit arrived to embark. However, his liking for military life led him to remain attached to his regiment, participating in the First World War in the role of an officer of the Royal Army Medical Corps in France.

At the age of twenty, due to his intelligence and dedication, he obtained a scholarship to the St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in Paddington. At the end of his studies, he joined the team of bacteriologist Sir Almroth Wright, who deserved great respect, was associated for forty years. years with Wright. Simultaneously in 1908 he worked as a professor of bacteriology for twenty years at the University of London, was appointed professor emeritus and at the end of his work he was awarded the gold medal. He held until 1954 the address of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Microbiology, founded on his honor and on that of his former teacher and a great friend.

“The researcher suffers the disappointments, the long months spent in the wrong direction, the failures. But failures are also useful, because, well analyzed, they can lead to success. And for the researcher, there is no joy comparable to that of a discovery, no matter how small … “Alexander Fleming

The professional life of Alexander Fleming was dedicated to the investigation of the defense mechanisms of the human body to get rid of bacterial infections. Fleming discovered lysozyme in 1922 when he found that the nasal secretion had the ability to dissolve certain types of bacteria. Then he understood that this depended on an active enzyme present in numerous body tissues, although when the tissue has some affectation the activity of lysozyme is restricted. The finding proved to be highly interesting. As a result of the investigations undertaken by Paul Ehrlich thirty years earlier, the world of medicine celebrated this result, although there was still much to analyze.

During arduous days in the laboratory studying the alterations of certain staphylococcal colonies, Fleming proved that one of the cultures had been contaminated by a microorganism originated from the outside air, a fungus that he later identified as the Penicillium notatum. His scrupulous observation led him to verify that around the initial zone of contamination, the staphylococci had been arranged transparent, a phenomenon that Alexander correctly interpreted as the effect of an antibacterial substance distilled by the fungus.

His hours in the laboratory increased in order to verify that a pure culture broth of the fungus acquired, in a short time, a considerable level of antibacterial activity. He carried out several proposed practices to establish the degree of susceptibility to the broth of a wide range of pathogenic bacteria, noting that many of them were rapidly destroyed; He injected the culture in rabbits and mice, showed that it was innocuous for leukocytes, in a few words it was harmless for cells, in this case, animals. Finally, in the month of September 1928 discovered penicillin, one of the most important acquisitions of modern therapeutics. Although Alexander Fleming and his collaborators failed to obtain pure penicillin, we owe this to Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Walter Florey.

In 1941 the first satisfactory results with human patients began to come to light. Due to the context of war, the government allocated large resources for the multiplication of penicillin and its research development. As a result, in 1944 all the seriously wounded of the Battle of Normandy were treated with penicillin, thanks to their use And they saved many lives. Some months after his first observations, Fleming divulged the results obtained in a memory that today is a classic in the matter, but that at that time did not have the deserved resonance.

Although Fleming understood from the beginning the importance of the antibiosis phenomenon he had discovered, penicillin took about fifteen years to become the therapeutic agent of universal use that it is today. The discovery of Alexander Fleming, in fact, is understood as the finding of a substance, which was able to destroy pathogenic germs without harming the organism. Not only would it be responsible for saving millions of lives, but it would also revolutionize therapeutic methods, beginning the era of antibiotics and modern medicine. For this work, he was appointed sir in 1944.

One year later he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with British scientists Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain for their contributions to the improvement of penicillin. He then received the Gold Medal of Honor from the Royal College of Surgeons and was decorated with the Grand Cross of the order of Alfonso X, the Sage. Fame and recognition finally reached Fleming, who was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1942. During his time at the Royal Society, his wife Sarah Marion McElroy, an Irish nurse, was very supportive in his life and helped him achieve the recognition he had. But the life of this illustrious doctor ended on March 11, 1955, because of a heart attack. He was buried in the Cathedral of Saint Paul, in London.