Scientist who invented penicillin

A laboratory technician examining flasks of penicillin culture, taken by James Jarche for Illustrated magazine in Another vital figure in the lab was a biochemist, Dr. Norman Heatley, who used every available container, bottle and bedpan to grow vats of the penicillin mold, suction off the fluid and develop ways to purify the antibiotic. The makeshift mold factory he put together was about as far removed as one could get from the enormous fermentation tanks and sophisticated chemical engineering that characterize modern antibiotic production today.

Aware that the fungus Penicillium notatum would never yield enough penicillin to treat people reliably, Florey and Heatley searched for a more productive species. Yet even that species required enhancing with mutation-causing X-rays and filtration, ultimately producing 1, times as much penicillin as the first batches from Penicillium notatum. In the war, penicillin proved its mettle. Throughout history, the major killer in wars had been infection rather than battle injuries.

This is the penicillin table in a U. From January to May in , million units of pure penicillin were manufactured. By the end of the war, American pharmaceutical companies were producing billion units a month. Ironically, Fleming did little work on penicillin after his initial observations in Beginning in , after news reporters began to cover the early trials of the antibiotic on people, the unprepossessing and gentle Fleming was lionized as the discoverer of penicillin.

That problem was partially corrected in , when Fleming, Florey, and Chain — but not Heatley — were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In his acceptance speech, Fleming presciently warned that the overuse of penicillin might lead to bacterial resistance.

Do you have a question for Dr. Markel about how a particular aspect of modern medicine came to be? Send them to us at onlinehealth newshour. Howard Markel writes a monthly column for the PBS NewsHour, highlighting momentous historical events that continue to shape modern medicine.

Support Provided By: Learn more. Thursday, Nov The Latest. World Agents for Change. It was left to his fellow Nobelists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain , to demonstrate in that penicillin could be used as a therapeutic agent to fight a large number of bacterial diseases. Born in Lochfield, Ayrshire, Scotland, Fleming was the seventh of eight surviving children in a farm family. His father died when he was seven years old, leaving his mother to manage the farm with her eldest stepson.

Fleming, having acquired a good basic education in local schools, followed a stepbrother, already a practicing physician, to London when he was He spent his teenaged years attending classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, working as a shipping clerk, and serving briefly in the army during the Boer War — , although he did not see combat.

Then in he won a scholarship to St. Fleming accepted a post as a medical bacteriologist at St. Nonetheless, he turned over to Fleming samples of a new drug, Salvarsan, synthesized by Paul Ehrlich and colleagues for treating syphilis. He was able to demonstrate that then commonly used chemical antiseptics like carbolic acid do not sterilize jagged wounds; rather, pus has its own antibacterial powers.

After World War I, Fleming continued to work on leukocytes and antisepsis. In he discovered a substance in nasal mucus that causes bacteria to disintegrate. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in and died on March 11, His parents, Hugh and Grace were farmers, and Alexander was one of their four children. He also had four half-siblings who were the surviving children from his father Hugh's first marriage.

Fleming was a member of the Territorial Army and served from to in the London Scottish Regiment. He entered the medical field in , studying at St. While at St. Mary's, he won the gold medal as the top medical student. Fleming had planned on becoming a surgeon, but a temporary position in the Inoculation Department at St. Mary's Hospital changed his path toward the then-new field of bacteriology.

There, he developed his research skills under the guidance of bacteriologist and immunologist Sir Almroth Edward Wright, whose revolutionary ideas of vaccine therapy represented an entirely new direction in medical treatment. He worked as a bacteriologist, studying wound infections in a makeshift lab that had been set up by Wright in Boulogne, France.

Through his research there, Fleming discovered that antiseptics commonly used at the time were doing more harm than good, as their diminishing effects on the body's immunity agents largely outweighed their ability to break down harmful bacteria — therefore, more soldiers were dying from antiseptic treatment than from the infections they were trying to destroy. Fleming recommended that, for more effective healing, wounds simply be kept dry and clean.

However, his recommendations largely went unheeded. Returning to St. Mary's after the war, in , Fleming took on a new position: assistant director of St. Mary's Inoculation Department. He would become a professor of bacteriology at the University of London in , and an emeritus professor of bacteriology in In November , while nursing a cold, Fleming discovered lysozyme, a mildly antiseptic enzyme present in body fluids, when a drop of mucus dripped from his nose onto a culture of bacteria.

Thinking that his mucus might have some kind of effect on bacterial growth, he mixed it with the culture.