Sir Alexander Fleming was born at Lochfield near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland on August 6, 1881. He attended Louden Moor School, Darvel School, and Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London where he attended the Polytechnic.
He spent four years in a shipping office before entering St. Mary’s Medical School, London University. He qualified with distinction in 1906 and began research at St. Mary’s under Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneet in vaccine therapy. He gained M.B.B.S., (London), with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary’s until 1914. He served throughout World War I as a captain in the Army Medical Corps, being mentioned in dispatches, and in 1918 he returned to St.Mary’s. He was elected Professor of the School in 1928 and Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology, University of London in 1948 and Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology, University of London in 1948. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1943 and knighted in 1944.
Early in his medical life, Fleming became interested in the natural bacterial action of the blood and in antiseptics. He was able to continue his studies throughout his military career and on demobilization he settled to work on antibacterial substances which would not be toxic to animal tissues. In 1921, he discovered in ’tissues and secretions’ an important bacteriolytic substance whiuch he named Lysozyme. About this time, he devised sensitivity titration methods and assays in human blood and other boly fluids, which he subsequently used for the titration of penicillin. In 1928, while working on influenza virus, he observed that mould had developed accidently on a staphylococcus culture plate and that the mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. He was inspired to further experiment and he found that a mould culture prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. He named the active substance penicillin.
Sir Alexander wrote numerous papers on bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy, including original descriptions of lysozyme and penicillin. They have been published in medical and scientific journals.
He served as President of the Society for General Microbiology, he was a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Science and Honorary Member of almost all the medical and scientific societies of the world. He was Rector of Edinburgh University during 1951-1954. He was also awarded honourary doctorate of almost thirty European and American Universities.
Dr. Fleming died on March 11 in 1955.