The Dawn of the Antibiotic Era | The History of Sir Alexander Fleming’s Accidental Discovery and Development of Penicillin
Prologue
The quest to create the first mass-produced antibiotic capable of curing a bacterial infection began in 1928 with the accidental discovery of a moldy petri dish. Before that, there was no effective treatment for illnesses like pneumonia, gonorrhea, or rheumatic fever. Blood poisoning from cuts or scratches was common in hospitals, and the only treatment available to doctors was to wait and hope. That’s why the discovery of Penicillin marked a real turning point in human history when doctors finally had a tool that could fully treat their patients of fatal infectious diseases. Today I’m going to tell you the remarkable story of the accidental discovery of Penicillin!
What is an Antibiotic?
Bacteria and fungi create substances called antibiotics that have the power to either kill or suppress other microbial species that compete with them. This concept may have been known by the ancient Egyptians who used a poultice of moldy bread to wounds that were diseased. However, it was not until 1928 that Alexander Fleming, a professor of bacteriology at St. Mary's Hospital in London, discovered Penicillin, the first real antibiotic!
The Early Years of Sir Alexander Fleming
On 6th August 1881, Sir Alexander Fleming was born in Lochfield Farm, Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland. Alexander Fleming was seventh among the eight children of a Scottish Hill farmer Hugh Fleming. His mother Grace Stirling Morton was the second wife of his father. He had his basic education at Loudoun Moor School, Darvel School, and Kilmarnock Academy. Then he moved to London to live with his older brother, Thomas (who was an oculist in the past), where he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution. After passing out from the polytechnic, he worked as a shipping clerk in London for some time. When he was 20 years old, he inherited some money from an uncle and decided to study medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in 1901. In 1908 he won the Gold Medal as a top medical student at the University of London. Initially, he wanted to become a surgeon. But later on, he changed his mind and wanted to become a research fellow in microbiology. At this point, he came in contact with the famous bacteriologist and immunologist Sir Almroth Edward Wright who was giving many new ideas of vaccine therapy to new medical students, and became his assistant. It is said that during these initial years, Fleming had an uncommunicative and shy personality with very poor lecturing skills but later with the success of Penicillin he blossomed into the world’s one of the best-known scientists.
Between 1909 and 1914, Fleming established a private practice as a venereologist (study of sexually transmitted diseases) and married Sarah Marion McElroy, an Irish nurse. Their son Robert, born in 1924 became a doctor and a reputed physician. Fleming was an expert in administering arsphenamine also called Salvarsan, a drug for syphilis discovered by a Geman scientist Paul Ehrlich in the year 1910. During World War I, he served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps. During this period, he got the opportunity to study the bacteriology of wound infection. There his observation was that one should not use strong medicines for wounds but should keep them clean with a mild saline solution.
In 1921-1922, Fleming discovered Lysozyme, an enzyme present in body fluids like tear, saliva, and milk that catalyzes the destruction of the peptidoglycan layer of cell walls of bacteria and fungi and eventually kills them, thereby acting as a natural antibiotic, and enhancing the efficacy of other antibiotics.
Sir Alexander Fleming holding a Petri Dish in his lab at St. Mary’s Hospital, London
The Accidental Discovery of Penicillin
In September 1928, soon after he became Professor of Bacteriology, he was investigating staphylococcus in his lab. Staphylococcus is a bacteria responsible for abscesses, sore throats, and boils. A petri dish with a staphylococcus culture was mistakenly left on a lab bench (instead of an incubator as planned) before Fleming departed for a two-week vacation.
On 28th September, when he came back from his holiday, he observed that a mold (a fungus called Penicillium notatum) had developed accidentally on the staphylococcus culture plate which created a bacteria-free circle around itself. He experimented further and found that a mold culture prevented the growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. Fleming made a filtrate of the mold and found that it could kill many other types of bacteria like meningococcus and the diphtheria bacillus, while the test animals suffered no noticeable adverse effects. Fleming published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in June 1929, naming the substance Penicillin, and hypothesizing that it could work as a medicine.
Sample of Penicillin mold presented by Sir Alexander Fleming to Douglas Macleod, his colleague at St. Mary’s hospital in 1935
Penicillin as a Medicine
The actual use of Penicillin as a medicine was delayed since Fleming had neither the laboratory resources at St. Mary’s nor the chemistry background to successfully isolate the active ingredient of the Penicillium mold juice and purify it for therapeutic use. Two chemists from Oxford University, Howard Walter Florey (an Australian pathologist) and Ernst Boris Chain (German-born British biochemist), were the first to succeed in 1940.
Florey, Chain, and other members of the Oxford Team who were working on Penicillin
One of the first Penicillin samples isolated from the urine of the patient who was treated with Penicillin
One of the first commercially available versions of Penicillin
Use of Penicillin in World War II
Following this, Penicillin advanced quickly, in part because of its widespread usage during World War II. During World War II, Penicillin helped lower the number of soldiers killed and amputations. Records show that during the first five months of 1943, there were only 400 million units of Penicillin accessible; by the end of World War II, American companies were producing 650 billion units each month.
Penicillin advertisements during World War II
Knighthood and Nobel Prize
Fleming was conferred knighthood in 1944. In 1945, Fleming, Chain, and Florey shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for "the discovery of Penicillin and its curative effect on various infectious diseases." In his acceptance speech, Fleming predicted the issue of antibiotic resistance in the future - the moment at which bacteria would become resistant to Penicillin and other antibiotics as a result of overuse.
The Nobel Prize of Sir Alexander Fleming displayed in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
Final Years of Sir Alexander Fleming
In 1949, Sir Alexander Fleming lost his first wife Sarah. In 1953, two years before his death, Fleming remarried Greek microbiologist Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas. On 11th March 1955, Sir Alexander Fleming had an acute attack of coronary thrombosis at his home in London and left us forever. He was laid to rest in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.
Epilogue
I would like to end today’s story with a quote from Sir Alexander Fleming that marked the dawn of the so-called antibiotic era, “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did!”
This article is authored by my father Dr. Kamal Kumar Sengupta. He is a retired doctor with a five-decade-long career as an eye surgeon, a patented inventor of ophthalmic surgical instruments, and an author of ocular pharmacology textbooks. Post-retirement, he decided to invest his time in writing motivational stories from across the globe that will inspire future generations to experience the world, explore ideas, and follow their dreams. I hope you liked this article and if you did, don’t forget to let us know in the comments below!
All images in the article are royalty-free images from jstor.org and sciencemuseum.org.uk used for visualization purposes only. We hold no copyright on the images.
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