Alexander fleming who is

In he saw that in addition to bacteria, a mold fungus had begun to grow in a bowl and that the bacteria's growth had been impeded in the vicinity of the mold.

He concluded that the mold contained a substance that was effective against bacteria. The substance was given the name penicillin and became the basis for medication to treat bacterial infections. Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive. His interest in bacteriology deepened. In , he returned to St. In , he discovered the bacteriolytic substance found in tears and other bodily secretions, which he named lysozyme, but this substance was not particularly strong.

In , Fleming left his lab for a two-week vacation, and his failure to clean up his workspace resulted in one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time. He returned to the lab to find that a mold had accidentally developed on a staphylococcus culture plate that he had left out in the open. On the plate, a bacteria-free circle surrounded the yellow-green mold. This intrigued Fleming. He deduced that the mold must have released some substance that had inhibited the growth of the bacteria.

He conducted experiments on the specimen and found that the mold culture prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted times. The mold, he discovered, had been created by a spore of a rare variant called Penicillium notatum, which had likely drifted up from a mycology lab on another floor. However, his work would remain obscure for nearly a decade. In , a team of scientists at Oxford University, led by Australian physiologist Howard Florey, began working to identify and isolate substances from molds that could kill bacteria.

As far back as the 19th century, antagonism between certain bacteria and molds had been observed, and a name was given to this phenomenon— antibiosis —but little was made of these observations.

A folk tradition using molds in medicine was similarly neglected. In Alexander Fleming — discovered penicillin, made from the Penicillium notatum mold, but he did not receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery until 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.