Alexander Fleming was born in Lochfield, Scotland, on August 6, 1881.

He
attended the Louden Moor School, The Dravel School and Kilmarnock
Academy before moving to London in 1895. In London he finished his basic
education at the Regent Street Polytechnic.
Fleming was a member of the Territorial Army, and served from 1900 to
1994 in the London Scottish Regiment. He entered the medical field in 1901,
studying at St. Marys, he won the 1908 gold medal as the top medical
student. There, he developed his research skills under the guidance of
bacteriologist and immunologist Sir. Almroth Edward Wright, whose
revolutionary ideas of vaccine therapy represented an entirely new direction
in medical treatment.
In November 1921, Fleming discovered lysozyme. The finding was revealed
highly interesting; since it demonstrated the possible existence of
substances, being harmless to the bodys cells, prove lethal to bacteria.
In September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory after a month away
with his family and noticed that a culture of Staphylococcus aureus he had
left out had become contaminated with a mold (later indentified as
Penicillum notatum). He also discovered that the colonies of staphylococci
surrounding this mold had been destroyed.
At the time, he had discovered the first antibiotic or kill bacteria,
substance which initially called mold juice and then changed the name to
penicillin as the mold that produced it.
After isolating the fungus and animal testing, it proved harmless to
leukocytes, which was a reliable indication that should be harmless to
animal cells.
Penicillin still took fifteen years to become the therapeutic agent for
universal use that later became. The reasons for this delay are varied, but
one of the most important factors that determined what was the instability
of penicillin, which made its purification in a very difficult process for
chemical techniques available. The solution came with the research
conducted by the team at Oxford who led the Australian pathologist H.W.
Florey and his co-worker, Ernest Chain.
In 1941 the first successful result were obtained with human patients. The
war situation determined to be devoted to product development resources
important enough for that already in 1944, all the seriously wounded from
the battle of Normandy could be treated with penicillin.
With some delay, fame finally reached Fleming, who was elected to the
Royal Society in 1942, received the title of Sir. , two years later, and finally
in 1945, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize.

In 1946 he was appointed director of the Wright- Fleming Institute of

Microbiology, founded in his honor and that of his former teacher and
colleague.
Additionally, Fleming served as president of the society for General
Microbiology, and he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science.
He was also awarded honorary doctorate degrees from nearly 30 European
and American universities.
Fleming died of a heart attack on March 11, 1955, at his home in London,
England.