Alexander Fleming was born near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1881, a few weeks after Sheriff Pat Garrett killed his outlaw friend Billy the Kid in a house in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was the seventh of eight children who grew up on a large isolated farm, and who moved to London after the death of their father. His older brother Tom had a medical practice near Regent Street and apparently encouraged him to go to the nearby Polytechnic School and enter business. He spent four years in a shipping office, but eventually became bored and decided to use his qualifications to study medicine. He had a choice of many medical schools in the area and only chose St. Mary's, because he had once played water polo against them.
In 1900, Fleming joined a Scottish regiment, intending to fight in the Boer War, which was being fought between the British and the Afrikaners of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. It is known that he never actually went to South Africa, but instead used the time to improve his skills in shooting, swimming, and water polo. After the war ended, his uncle died and left him 250 pounds which his brother encouraged him to put toward the study of medicine.
In 1905, he was pursuing a career in surgery, as Albert Einstein was trying to convince the world that light should be considered as a stream of tiny particles. Meanwhile back in St. Mary's, the Captain of the Rifle Club was concerned that if Fleming became a surgeon he would have to leave the hospital and his team would lose their best marksman. The Captain worked in the Inoculation Service of the hospital and he convinced Fleming to switch over to bacteriology in an effort to save his team. The unusual career move meant that Fleming would stay at St. Mary's for the rest of his career. He qualified with distinction in 1906 and began research under Sir Almroth Wright, who is remembered as a pioneer in vaccine therapy.
He was awarded a Gold Medal in Bacteriology in 1908, and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1909, the same year that the German chemist Paul Ehrlich developed a chemical treatment for syphilis. Erlich had tried hundreds of compounds, and the six hundred and sixth worked. It was named salvarsan (meaning "that which saves by arsenic"). The only previous treatments for this disease had been so toxic that they often killed the patient. Fleming became one very few physicians to administer salvarsan by the new technique of intravenous injection. He soon developed such a busy practice he got the nickname "Private 606."
In 1914, an assassin gunned down Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and started the First World War. Fleming convinced his staff to go to France and set up a battlefield hospital laboratory. He was horrified by the vast numbers of soldiers who died from simple infections caused by exploding shells and became convinced that there must be another chemical like salvarsan that could fight microbe infection. When the war ended he returned to St. Mary's, determined to find an effective antiseptic. In 1921, he discovered an important bacteriolytic substance, which he named Lysozyme. After returning from a holiday in 1928, he observed the dissolving of staphylococci by a Penicillium mould, and the rest of that stroy is well recorded history.
It is less well known that the young Irish mycologist C. J. La Touche worked in the laboratory below Fleming and that he isolated the powerful penicillin-producing strain of mould (Penicillium notatum). Because his laboratory lacked a fume hood, the room was contaminated with these spores, which probably wafted up to Fleming's laboratory. It is also of interest that despite the myth, Fleming usually left his door open because it was actually almost impossible to open his window. He named the active substance penicillin and found that it prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. In 1915, he married Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, Ireland, who died in 1949. Their son is a general medical practitioner. Fleming married again in 1953, to Dr. Amalia Koutsouri-Voureka, a Greek colleague at St. Mary's.
In 1929, Josef Stalin became dictator to the Soviet Union. It was the same year that Fleming published a report on penicillin and its potential uses in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. His paper apparently raised little interest. He worked with the mould for some time, but found out that refining the active substance was a difficult process better suited to chemists. The work of purification was taken over by a team of chemists and mould specialists, but the research was terminated when several of them died or relocated. The battlefield infections of World War II revitalised interest in penicillin and the scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain eventually purified the compound.
Alexander Fleming was knighted in 1944 in recognition for his contribution to the development of Penicillin and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945. He was appointed Rector of Edinburgh University in 1951, and it is less well known he was also elected Honorary Chief Doy-gei-tau of the Kiowa tribe in the same year. He retired in 1954 and was buried in St Paul's Cathederal a year later. It was 1955, and across the Atlantic, Walt Disney was preparing to open his first theme park, Disneyland.
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