Today (March 11, 1955) is the anniversary of Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming's discovery of the antibiotic penicillin.
Sir Alexander Fleming was born on August 6, 1881, in Scotland. His youth
was set in a mountainous area surrounded by nature. There, he was
trained to admire nature and learn to look at anything. It was this exercise
that later helped him discover the miraculous drug penicillin. After graduating
from college, he joined a shipping company at 16. The clerical work
did not satisfy him. The property, obtained from a distant relative, made him join the medical college in his late 20s. He lost his father at a very
young age and faced many hardships in life. Fleming was an outstanding
student at St. Mary's Medical School. He is proud to have won many prizes for
his ingenuity in various fields of a medical study. After graduating from medical
school, he joined Almroth Wright, a microbiology teacher, as a research
student.
Fleming has never been the only bookworm. He was heavily involved in
various fields besides medicine. He was very interested in swimming and polo.
Under the guidance of his teacher Wright, Fleming invented the vaccine for
typhoid fever. Shortly before this, Louis Pasteur had introduced the vaccine
for cattle. In this case, Wright tried to inject inactivated viruses into the
vaccine to promote immunity. Wright, their student, Fleming, studied
white blood cells. It is noteworthy that these white blood cells can resist pathogenic microorganisms. The discovery of penicillin is unique
among the medical advances known to the world. It is common for women to die
before childbirth and for babies to die after birth. Even mild abrasions and
scratches can lead to death.
Only after discovering toxins, such as penicillin, which could kill
one microbe and another, could humans be saved from many diseases. Alexander
Fowling is the proud scientist who discovered penicillin and ushered in the era
of modern antidotes. It is estimated that penicillin has saved the lives of 200
million people worldwide. If only the Wright group had been vaccinated during
World War I in four years, thousands of people would have died of typhoid fever.
Toxins such as carbolic acid, boric acid, and hydrogen peroxide treated war-wounded soldiers. Fleming proved that these drugs did not help the
treatment, destroyed the white blood cells, and led to the death of many
more. He turned his attention to finding a perfect antidote. He isolated the
antibiotic penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum.
He grew different microorganisms on plates and began to study their movements. When he took a drop or two of water from his nose and put it on a plate containing bacteria, he saw that only the bacteria around the mucus had been destroyed. Similarly, he took many fluids secreted in the body such as tears, saliva and pus and conducted research. He found that all of these fluids could prevent germs from growing. He named this naturally occurring toxin 'lysozyme'. In 1928, while looking at a plate on which the microbes had grown, he accidentally discovered that the lysozyme had done something that the mushrooms had never done before. The fungus kills germs called staphylococci that cause blisters, tumours, nose, throat, and skin infections. Not only that, but he discovered that the essence of the mushroom did not destroy white blood cells and did not affect other tissues.
Fleming named the fungus "penicillin". But penicillin could
not be produced in large quantities at that time. The Oxford University team,
including Howard Florey and Ernest Chain, achieved it 14 years later. The
team also found other safe antibiotics for people with
penicillin allergies. In 1945, Alexander Fleming, Howard Flory, and Ernest
Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was
knighted by King George VI in 1944. Alexander Fleming was also included in Time
magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century
published in 1999. By the end of 2000, three popular Swedish magazines had
declared penicillin the greatest invention of the last millennium.
Alexander Fleming was included in Britain's list of the 100 most influential people in the world by popular vote in 2002. An asteroid in the
asteroid force was named 91006 Fleming in memory of Alexander Fleming.
Alexander Fleming, the Nobel laureate who discovered the antibiotic penicillin,
passed away on March 11, 1955, in London, England, at 73.
Source By: Wikipedia
Information: Ramesh, Assistant Professor of Physics, Nehru Memorial
College, Puthanampatti, Trichy.
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