Sir Alexander Fleming

Following the death of his father, Fleming moved to London, where his brother, Tom, who had studied medicine, was opening a practice. Young Fleming - or Alec, as he was called - was then about fourteen and went to the Polytechnic School in Regent Street. After completing school, he worked as a shipping clerk for five years but it was a job in which he was never happy.

When an uncle died and left him a small legacy, his brother Tom convinced him to use the money to study medicine. He therefore enrolled as a student at St Mary's Medical School in Paddington, which was part of London University.

In 1908 he graduated, MB, BS with Gold Medal, and became a lecturer at St. Mary's until the start of the First World War in 1914. Since early in his medical life, Fleming had been interested in the natural bacterial action of the blood and in antiseptics. A German, Paul Ehrlich, had developed, in 1909, an arsenic based substance, Salvarsan, for treating syphilis and when he brought news of his treatment to London, Fleming became one of the very few physicians to administer it. He did so with the fairly new - and then very difficult - technique of intravenous injection.

Alexander Fleming was able to continue his studies throughout his distinguished military career as a captain in the Army Medical Corp and was frustrated to see so many soldiers die from simple wounds which became infected. Fleming believed that it must be possible to develop a chemical similar to Salvarsan that could help fight microbe infection even in serious wounds.

At the end of the war he started to search for antibacterial substances that would not be toxic to animal tissue. In 1921 he discovered Lysozyme, an enzyme occurring in some body tissues and fluids, such as tears, which had a natural antibacterial effect but only against very mild infections.

In 1928 the miracle happened! While working on an influenza virus he took a well deserved few days break and on returning started to clear up his lab, which was always rather chaotic. He noticed by chance that on one of the dishes where he had been growing bacteria a mould had formed. Nothing unusual in that but all around the mould the bacteria had been killed. That was very unusual!

Fleming took a sample of the mould and identified it as being from the penicillium family, later confirmed as penicillium notatum a spore of which had apparently drifted in from another lab... What he had discovered and named Penicillin, was a potential major breakthrough for the medical world but not initially seen as such, except - thankfully - by Fleming himself.

Continuing to work with the mould, he had difficulty in refining and growing it. An ever changing team of chemists and mould specialists worked on it over the next few years but with little success. Only at the start of World War Two were the possibilities of Penicillin taken seriously. An Australian, Howard Florey, and a German refugee, Ernst Chain, took up the challenge to develop it so that it could be produced in large quantities. They were eventually successful and with the help of the American drugs industry, it was being produced by the early forties in great volume.

By way of a treatment for the common cold, Sir Alexander Fleming was said to have recommended a traditional Scottish remedy. A generous measure of whisky with a little sugar, topped up with boiling water and taken at bed time. "It might not be very scientific," he reportedly said, "but it tastes good and it does you good!"