LIFE AND

CONTRIBUTION OF
EMINENT SCIENTIST
 Life and education
• Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish Physician,Microbiologist and
Pharmacologist.

• His best known discoveries are the enzyme Lysozyme in 1923 and the worlds
first antibiotic substance benzyl penicillin (penicillin G) from the mould
Penicillium notatum in 1928.

• He was born on August 6 ,1881 in Ayrshire , Scotland and was the seventh
child of a farmer named Hugh Fleming.

• He was married twice and had only one child ,a son named Robert who
followed his father in to the field of medicine.

• Fleming died in 1955 at the age of 73.

• He is buried at St.Paul’s Cathedral in London.

• He first attended Loudoun Moor School and Davel School in his childhood ,
then received a scholarship to study at Kilmarnock Academy where he study
for two years.

• He then moved to London to study at the Royal Polytechnic Institution there .

• Initially he did not enter the field of medicine and worked at a shipping office
for four years .

• Then ,he decided to enrol at St.Mary’s Hospital Medical School, from where
he graduated with distinction and also received a gold medal on completing
his MBBS.
 Professional achievments and
contributions
• Untill 1914 ,Fleming served as a lecturer at St.Mary’s.
• Originally ,he had planned to become a surgeon but then he got
interested in the field of bacteriology which was a relatively new
venture at the time.
• He worked under the patronage of Sir Almroth Edward Wright and
adapted his innovative ideas and way of thinking .
• During World War 1 ,Fleming served as a captain in the Army
Medical Corps .
• During the War he continued to conduct research and noticed that
the antiseptics being used to treat wounded soldiers were
sometimes more harmful than the damage caused by the wounds
themselves.

• He suggested that in order to let the wounds heal,they just needed

to be kept safe and dry but this was largely ignored.

• At the end of the War Fleming returned to St.Mary’s and became

the assistant director of the Inoculation Department there.

• His research work began to gain repute and he was already a well
known scientist before his great discovery.
• The discovery of penicillin took place in 1928 initially by a chance
accident.

• After being away on holiday for a month ,when Fleming came back
to his lab he found that some cultures of staphylococci had been left
outside by mistake and that these had caught a fungus .

• However ,the cultures immediately surrounding the fungus had been

destroyed .

• Further research into the matter led him to realise that the fungus
produced a substance that would kill harmful bacteria that caused
diseases.
• Fleming named this fungus penicillin and try to grow it in his lab.

• He published his discovery in the “Journal of Experimental

Pathology” in 1929 but did not receive much attention at the time
as most of his clinical trials has been inconclusive and penicillin
could not be produced in large enough quantities to be useful.

• Fleming was convinced that the fungus had limited usefulness but
his research was taken up by two researchers from Oxford
University named Ernst Chain and Howard Florey .
• These two were successful in producing purified penicillin which
became indispensable during World War II ,and helped to save
thousands of lives through its use in antibiotics.

• In 1945 ,as a result of their combined efforts and discoveries ,

Fleming ,Chain and Florey were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize
in Medicine.

• Fleming was made the head of St.Mary’s Inoculation Department

in 1946.
• He was also the president of the Society for General
Microbiology,and an honorary member dozens of other medical
and scientific societies .

• He served as the rector of Edinburgh University from 1951 to

1954 and received dozens of honorary degrees from Universities
world wide.
 Awards
• He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and
Ernst Boris Chain for the invention of penicilin.

• Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1943.

• He was awarded the Hunterian Professorship by the Royal College of Surgeons of

England.

• John Scott Legacy Medal and Premium (1944).

• Albert Medal (1946)

• He received countless honours both during his life time and after his death including a
knighthood by King George VI in 1944.