When tidying up his usual clutter of test tubes and mouldy culture plates, Fleming noticed something unusual. One of the plates was covered with golden-yellow colonies of bacteria. However, where a droplet of mucus from Fleming's nose had fallen two weeks earlier there were no bacteria at all. They had been wiped out.
Fleming went on to prove that many body fluids contain a substance that can dissolve certain bacteria quickly. He named the substance 'lysozyme'. This comes from the words 'lysing' meaning dissolving and 'enzyme' — a class of proteins which catalyse, or enable, chemical reactions. Lysozyme could potentially kill off some bacteria without harming human cells.
Because of this Fleming was keen to find out the significance of this substance and research its properties.
A folk tradition using molds in medicine was similarly neglected. In Alexander Fleming — discovered penicillin, made from the Penicillium notatum mold, but he did not receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery until It was left to his fellow Nobelists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain , to demonstrate in that penicillin could be used as a therapeutic agent to fight a large number of bacterial diseases.
Born in Lochfield, Ayrshire, Scotland, Fleming was the seventh of eight surviving children in a farm family. His father died when he was seven years old, leaving his mother to manage the farm with her eldest stepson. Fleming, having acquired a good basic education in local schools, followed a stepbrother, already a practicing physician, to London when he was He spent his teenaged years attending classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, working as a shipping clerk, and serving briefly in the army during the Boer War — , although he did not see combat.
Then in he won a scholarship to St. While serving in the army, he became a marksman. The captain convinced Fleming to pursue a career in research instead of surgery, so that he could stay at the school. Fleming was taken under the wing of Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in immunology and vaccine research.
Fleming remained with this research group for his entire career. As an Army Medical Corps captain in World War I, he witnessed many of his fellow soldiers die as a result of uncontrolled infection.
At the time, antiseptics were used and often caused more harm than good. Fleming wrote an article discussing the anaerobic bacteria present in deep wounds, which were not destroyed by the antiseptics. His research was not accepted initially, but he continued on. In , Fleming discovered lysozyme, an enzyme with weak antibacterial properties that inhibited bacterial growth. Perspective Back to Top Theodore C. Eickhoff, MD The discovery of penicillin changed the world of medicine enormously.
With its development, infections that were previously severe and often fatal, like bacterial endocarditis, bacterial meningitis and pneumococcal pneumonia, could be easily treated. Even dating all the way back to World War II and today with the war in Iraq, soldiers experienced injuries that would have been fatal without penicillin and other antibiotics that were developed subsequently.
It is really impossible for me to imagine what the world would be like without penicillin. I question whether there would be a discipline of infectious diseases as we know it today.
There were beginning treatments for pneumococcal pneumonia in the s with antisera and sulfonamides, but use of these treatments quickly came to a halt, and everyone began using penicillin. This quickly led to a number of pharmaceutical industries beginning to screen a variety of other natural products for antibacterial activity, which led to a whole host of new antibiotics, such as streptomycin, aminoglycosides, tetracycline and the like.
Penicillin clearly led the way in that development. It is interesting that using penicillin for the treatment of infections like pneumococcal pneumonia and bacterial endocarditis never had a randomized, controlled trial because the difference with treatment was so clearly apparent that no one even thought of doing a randomized controlled trial.
Theodore C. Disclosures: Eickhoff reports no relevant financial disclosures. Read more about penicillin. Related Content.
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