Today in Technology History
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March 11
The world might never have known of penicillin if Alexander Fleming hadn't been such a patient man.
Fleming was born to a Scottish farming family in 1881. When he was thirteen years old, he moved to London to live with one of his eight siblings. He studied medicine, and during the First World War, he made some brilliant discoveries about how antiseptics work -- proving that some harsh antiseptics actually do more harm than good.
After the war, Fleming began to search for a substance that could battle bacteria without harming the body. His colleagues were convinced it couldn't be done: any medicine that fought infection would probably do some concomitant damage to the patient. In 1921, he discovered that certain organic materials (like human tears and saliva) contain a chemical that had some moderate power to fight bacteria. He published some papers on this chemical (lysozyme) but there was little scientific interest.
So, patiently, Fleming kept working.
In 1928, he checked some bacteria cultures he was growing and noticed that a tiny bit of mold had blown in through a window in his dirty basement laboratory and, by chance, had landed in one of his bacteria cultures -- and the mold was killing the bacteria. Fleming isolated the precise substance that was attacking the bacteria, and he named it "penicillin" (a word based on the scientific name of the source mold). Unfortunately, Fleming couldn't produce enough penicillin to run tests, and again, there was little scientific interest.
Even though Fleming couldn't afford to spend more time on penicillin research, he patiently kept a strain of the original mold growing in one corner of his lab -- convinced, as he was, that scientists would someday pay attention.
In the end, Fleming's patience paid off. In 1938, other scientists finally showed interest, and they came to take samples of his bacteria-fighting mold. The drug form of penicillin was available for military use by the end of the Second World War, and the patient Fleming received a knighthood in 1944 and a Nobel in 1945. He died on March 11, 1955.
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