Alexander Fleming and Deserved Inspiration

Imagine being diagnosed with venereal disease. It’s a difficult diagnosis for anyone, but imagine being told that your only possible cure is to be infected with malaria. The brain-damaging high fever that results from malaria would either cure the venereal disease or it would kill you quickly; either way, it was better than the slow, painful death due to VD. Less than a century ago, those were your only options.

Today people with VD – along with hundreds of millions more – owe their lives and their health in large part to one man: Sir Alexander Fleming.

Alexander Fleming was born August 6, 1881 in Scotland. Though he boasted a diverse range of talents – glass blower and rifleman among them – at the age of sixteen he began working in a shipping office. He spent four years in this unlikely occupation until he inherited sufficient money to enroll in medical school.

Throughout World War I, Fleming served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. It was here that he brought his diverse talents to bear. Despite the liberal use of antiseptics, Fleming saw countless soldiers die from deep wounds. Fleming used his glass blowing skill to make a test tube with conical spikes drawn from the bottom. He filled the test tube with serum, then inoculated it with fecal matter to simulate an infected wound. Repeated washing of the test tube with antiseptics didn’t sterilize the test tube any more than they sterilized the crevices of an actual wound.

After watching so many people lose their lives to sepsis, Fleming began his search for antibacterial agents. His first serendipitous discover came when he was examining one of his plates of bacteria. He had a bit of a head cold, and his runny nose dripped onto the culture. Fleming later noticed that the colonies had cleared around the drip; he had proof that there were antibacterial substances that would not harm the human body. It’s worth pausing on this discovery. It seems so obvious to us now – we live in a world where you can purchase soap with antibiotics – that it’s hard to imagine a world in which the existence of human-friendly antimicrobials was an open question. It’s harder still to realize that such a world existed less than a century ago.

A second serendipity is well-known: Fleming left his lab a dirty mess when he departed for a holiday in 1928. When he returned, he found a fungus contaminating one of his petri dishes, and the bacteria colonies refused to go anywhere near it. The fungus was of course a species of the genus Penicillium. Fleming researched the purification and clinical utility of penicillin for the next decade and a half. Shortly after he dropped the pursuit, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain picked it up. By D-Day (1944), enough penicillin was produced to treat all wounded Allies.

According to ScienceHeroes.com, the discovery of penicillin has saved (and continues to save) over 80 million lives. That doesn’t include the dozens of other antibiotics discovered as a result of Fleming’s ground-breaking work. Over the course of human history, syphilis, typhoid fever and tuberculosis have each killed millions. It is estimated that bubonic plague (the Black Death) killed between 75 and 200 million people over the centuries. Now these diseases are dwindling from the human condition, thanks to Sir Alexander.

A lot of people like to point to Fleming as proof that scientific discoveries are the result of serendipity – as if the only way to improve the human condition is to sit around and wait for a gift from the universe. I regard that as an insult to a man who has save millions. Such remarks overlook the diverse interests Fleming nurtured that made him a better scientist. They ignore the compassion he felt towards his fellow soldiers, compassion that made him a keen observer and propelled his decades-long investigation. He was diligent with his work and careful with his observation, and when inspiration came, Sir Alexander Fleming was ready for it.