Alexander Fleming’s stroke of luck, or the accidental discovery of penicillin

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Some destinies are written in clay. Born in 1881, Alexander Fleming spent his childhood on a farm on the Lochfield Moors south of Glasgow in Scotland, which he left to study bacteriology in England. This is where the young man chose his path: laboratory medicine, experimental and exotic.

After becoming a lecturer at the medical school of St. Mary’s Hospital in London, Alexander Fleming shines with his new status: bow tie, flannel suit, trendy apartment in a beautiful neighborhood of London… But the mud, which has seen him born, finally catches up with him in 1914.

When World War I broke out, the budding doctor was sent, along with many of his colleagues, to makeshift hospitals scattered across the Western Front. In the horrors of the trenches, within the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lieutenant and then Captain Fleming came close to death. Bodies torn apart by barbed wire or scattered by grenades have nothing to do with a laboratory experiment.

And although care was provided, many soldiers did not survive their injuries and died of blood poisoning (septicemia), a very common scourge at the time. Moreover, Alexander Fleming condemned the common use of antiseptics of the time, which were hostile to war wounds. The experience of the battlefield will scar the doctor’s mind for life. Once he’s back in the lab, he promises to develop more effective clinical solutions.

Neglect of history

September 1928. As usual, the Scottish scientist is busy in the jungle of test tubes. He’s back in London with his family after a few weeks – a well-deserved vacation for an often overwhelmed man. The mess around him attests to this: Bunsen burners and calorimeters lie idle, microscopes move with their eyes, pipettes of vomited unknown substances drop-drop into aluminum sinks.

Deciding to put some order to his bench, the biologist turns to a corner of the room: a petri dish containing strains. Staphylococcus Awkwardly stacked there. He had studied his behavior before going on leave. But the bacterial culture caught the researcher’s attention: the mold had been there during his long absence. Did she come in through a window left open in this scorching month of August? Was he contaminated by his colleague Merlin Price’s experiment?

Far from blaming his carelessness, Alexander Fleming examines the length of the box. He noticed that the bacterial strains disappeared in the space occupied by the mold, as if the fungus had eliminated the bacteria in its wake. Always full of poise, Alexander Fleming doesn’t get carried away. It starts by showing the culture to the colleague. “Look at thisHe told her. It is interesting; And it can be important.

Alexander Fleming decided to continue the experiment. her “Mold Juice”, as he affectionately calls it, expels the pathogens responsible for pneumonia, diphtheria, meningitis and scarlet fever. Alexander Fleming had just begun to imagine the importance of his discovery: in 1929, he named it “penicillin”.

Australian pharmacologist Howard Walter Florey (left) and German-British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain, in their offices at the School of Pathology at Oxford University (England), in 1944. | United Kingdom Ministry of Information Photo Service Photographer via Wikimedia Commons – via Wikimedia Commons

But the road to synthesizing an adequate formula is long. He should multiply tests to try to stabilize the treatment with the help of experienced chemists. A bacteriologist is on the verge of abandoning a project that has cost him 12 years of effort when other experts – Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chen – take it over. Although the miracle substance helped treat a few patients in the 1940s, it was extremely rare. So rare, in fact, that when doses are injected into patients, they are recovered in their filtered urine.

After numerous attempts, Howard W. Florey and Ernst B. Chain eventually succeeded in devising an ideal formula to begin mass production. This is timely: World War II has just broken out, with its terrible wounds to deal with. Alexander Fleming has a revenge for Mud.

Saved more than 80 million lives

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which decided the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941, the production of the “miracle drug” accelerated. American laboratories are encouraged to devote all their efforts to this. The figures speak for themselves: 21 billion doses of penicillin were produced in 1943, more than 1,600 billion the following year, and finally 6,800 billion doses in 1945.

It is estimated that between 12 and 15% of the Allied forces owed their lives to Alexander Fleming’s inventions. But the Scottish biologist would never boast of it. “I did not invent penicillin

He will say. Nature did. I discovered it by accident.

Laboratory workers work on the production of penicillin in England in 1943. | Richard Stone / Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons – via Wikimedia Commons

This happy accident revolutionized the medical world, which led to the discovery of antibiotics. Internationally acclaimed, Sir Alexander Fleming was honored in 1945 by chemist Howard W. Florey and Ernst B. Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Penicillin is the most widely used antibiotic in the world today. And it is estimated that it has saved more than 80 million lives since its mass production in 1940. Thanks to the self-sacrifice of a few researchers… and a bit of luck from Bhagya.