Alexander Flemming
Alexander Fleming was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist who is best known for his discovery of the antibiotic substance penicillin in 1928. This breakthrough revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections and had a profound impact on medicine and public health. Fleming's work laid the foundation for the development of numerous other antibiotics, saving countless lives and shaping the field of microbiology.
6 Key excerpts on "Alexander Flemming"
eBook - ePub- Colin Salter(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Pavilion(Publisher)
...Even in late-nineteenth-century France, Arab stable hands applied mould to horses’ sores. Genetically modified fungi on an agar plate, part of the antibiotic production process. Fleming’s claim to fame is justified because he was able to repeat the contamination experimentally and to understand what was happening microbiologically. He saw the potential in it, and he tried this new antibacterial agent (which he named penicillin) on several different bacteria. Besides staphylococcus it worked against streptococcal species and the bacterium that causes diphtheria; but it was ineffective against typhoid and flu. Fleming asked some of his colleagues to isolate the active chemical compound in his penicillin, which at that stage was no more than fungus soup. When they couldn’t, he lost interest in further research into the phenomenon. But a student of his, Cecil Paine, became the first man to use penicillin as a treatment when he cured an infant of an eye infection, ophthalmia neonatorum, in 1930. Pure penicillin was finally isolated in 1940, by a research project headed by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, and two years later Alexander Fleming used it for the first time, in the treatment of meningitis. Early mass production of the drug was driven by the need to keep healthy the thousands of Allied troops fighting on the front lines of World War II. Penicillin has been a victim of its own success. It is so effective, and so widely prescribed, that some bacteria have developed a resistance to it. Nevertheless it has been described as “the single greatest victory ever achieved over disease”. Fleming, who with Chain and Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine, was typically self-effacing about his achievement: “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928,” he recalled, “I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer...
eBook - ePub- Anne Rooney(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Arcturus(Publisher)
...Investigation revealed that a mould, Penicillium notatum, had produced a chemical that was toxic to the Staphylococcus bacterium he had been growing. Fleming turned to other work, but in 1941 two pharmacologists, the Australian Howard Florey (1898–1968) and the German Ernst Chain (1906–79), developed Fleming’s Penicillium extract into a useable medicine we now know as penicillin. Its use during World War II saved the lives of many injured soldiers who would otherwise have died of infected wounds. Their work, which won Fleming, Florey and Chain the Nobel prize for medicine, is estimated to have saved 82 million lives to date. Alexander Fleming After penicillin, more antibiotics followed. Each antibiotic can only combat a particular range of infections caused by specific bacteria, so the search for new antibiotics continues. They seemed to be a wonder drug. Suddenly, many previously fatal infections could be treated. Antibiotics are now so familiar it can seem astonishing that this happened only in the middle of the last century; there are many people alive today who recall the era before antibiotics. Too good? Antibiotics seemed too good to be true – and perhaps they were. It wasn’t long before Staphylococcus, the bacterium Fleming had been growing, no longer responded to penicillin. Bacteria evolve quickly. They have such a short life cycle they can cram lots of generations into a brief period, reducing the time it takes for useful genetic mutations to appear to help them overcome challenges or changes in their environment. They can also exchange beneficial genetic mutations with other bacteria. So any mutation that allows a bacterium to resist an antibiotic quickly spreads to other bacteria. For the Staphylococcus bacterium, that challenge was penicillin. When Staphylococcus aureus became immune to penicillin, it should have been a wake-up call for medicine – but it wasn’t heeded. Use of antibiotics has increased astronomically...
eBook - ePub- Ghasem Najafpour(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Elsevier Science(Publisher)
...He identified the contaminants as mould. Later mould was identified as Penicillium sp. Fleming named the drug penicillin, which was isolated from Penicillium notatum. Fleming had discovered a new antibiotic, and for his great contribution he was awarded the Nobel Prize, in the field of medicine and physiology in 1945. His discovery was the answer to the question generated in his mind, which was why the colony of Staphylococcus did not grow in presence of Penicillium notatum. The commercial production of penicillin and other antibiotics is the most dramatic example of industrial microbiology. The annual production of bulk penicillin is about 33 million pounds, with annual sales market of more than US$344 million. 1 The mould isolated by Fleming was Penicillium notatum. He noted that it killed his culture of Staphylococcus aureus. Production of penicillin has been superceded by a better antibiotic-producing mould species, Penicillium chrysogenum. Development of submerged culture techniques has enhanced the cultivation of the mould in large-scale operations using sterile air supply. • Streptomycin is produced by Actinomycetes. • Molasses, corn steep liquor, waste product from the sugar industry and wet milling corn are used for the production of penicillin. • Penicillium chrysogenum can produce 1000 times more penicillin than Fleming’s original culture. 1, 3, 4 The major steps in the commercial production of penicillin are as follows. (1) Preparation of inoculum. (2) Preparations and sterilisation of medium. (3) Inoculation of the medium in the fermenter. (4) Forced aeration with sterile air during incubation. (5) Removal of mould mycelium after fermentation. (6) Extraction and purification of the penicillin. 11.4 PRODUCTION OF PENICILLIN There is only one choice for the antibiotic production process: the synthesis of benzylpenicillin (penicillin G, originally known as ‘penicillin’)...
eBook - ePubInfectious
Pathogens and How We Fight Them
- John S. Tregoning(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Oneworld Publications(Publisher)
...No one except him knows why he did this research, though it did earn him an Ig Nobel award, presented for the most ridiculous science of the year. Other winners include the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in ducks, a study of farting herrings and a demonstration that cracking knuckles does not cause arthritis 3 (the author only cracked the knuckles on one hand every day for fifty years). FN55 The fungi contaminating Fleming’s plates was a Penicillium, from which he named the active compound penicillin. Nothing much happened between the initial discovery in 1928 and 1940, when Howard Florey and Ernst Chain (latterly of Imperial), while working at Oxford University, developed a process for extracting penicillin from fungal broth, for which they shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Fleming. Working in the fraught early days of the Second World War, Florey and Chain rubbed spores of Penicillium into their clothes, so if forced to flee they could continue their research. Florey and Chain’s method was effective, but not efficient enough to produce a drug in sufficient quantities to treat people, because the strain of Penicillium they used, P. notatum, didn’t produce much penicillin. Mary Hunt (or Mouldy Mary), working for the US Department of Agriculture in Peoria, Illinois, had the romantic job of searching local markets to find better strains. In 1943 she struck mould. She found a strain of P. chrysogenum on the skin of a going-off cantaloupe, which produced two hundred times as much penicillin. A bit like selecting cows for greater milk yield, the scientists selectively bred a more productive yeast by bombarding it with X-rays. 4 Manufacturing scale-up followed and 2.3 million penicillin doses were prepared in time for the D-Day landings in 1944. Soldiers being soldiers, many of these doses were used to treat soldiers who had acquired STIs rather than battlefield injuries...
eBook - ePubThe Circulation of Penicillin in Spain
Health, Wealth and Authority
- María Jesús Santesmases(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...The public adulation of Fleming belonged to a social life of symbols during this early decade of Franco’s dictatorship, a social life of acknowledgements of the new state that had liberated Spain from ‘red power’. Part of the population experienced relief; the other, devastation. The captivating features of penicillin’s healing abilities were represented in Fleming’s lengthy visit. Applause followed the idol down the streets, to the bullfight, to cathedrals, museums, concerts and universities; gratitude was expressed with flowers at Las Rambles and in the words of monks at the Montserrat abbey. Recognition of the medical and political authorities was also exhibited, in every walk the Flemings took in Barcelona, Seville, Córdoba and Madrid, in private and public houses, in hospitals, medical academies and university halls, and in the shops where Fleming received gifts from thankful patients. Such public veneration of the drug was transferred to Fleming the discoverer. He felt the gratitude and adulation was excessive, beyond that which his achievements could justify, and he had a point: such fervour was embarrassing, and not only because it was overplayed, a social exaggeration of admiration for a dream expected to come true. This overacted homage was for the drug born when Fleming detected its activity in a Petri dish during the 1920s. Fleming had arrived from a distant place, and distance played its part in creating the mythical status of penicillin. 14 Help would come from a place beyond the miseries of Spanish daily life; the otherness represented by penicillin would provide the cure. From far away, from other regimes of commodities and rights, of factories and hospitals, penicillin would eventually arrive in enough quantity and at a price ‘for every pocket’, as clinician Gregorio Marañón demanded in the prologue to Florencio Bustinza ’s first book. Penicillin would arrive, but in the meantime those people in the direst need would have to wait...
eBook - ePubThe Arts of the Microbial World
Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan
- Victoria Lee(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...During penicillin domestication, academic scientists in the Central Laboratory of the JPRA simultaneously pursued immediate practical problems for industry and broader, longer-term research questions. It was not only the existence of microbiological expertise itself but the kind of microbiological expertise that was specific to Japan, a kind that blurred the lines between “pure” and “applied.” The configuration of expertise contrasts with that in the French wartime penicillin project, where the microbiologists involved did not share the military’s sensitivity to economic limitations in manufacturing, as well as with the prewar Prague-centered “applied science” fermentation knowledge, which later became important in Anglo-American penicillin production and which was less engaged with theoretical questions. The microbial engineering expertise showcased in the Prague example became significant globally for antibiotic science after World War II, but what was also important in antibiotic science and often overlooked was a biological approach to microbes and a sense for what microbes could do. In addressing the intellectual problems of penicillin domestication—from strain development for both surface and submerged culture to the investigation of culture media, refinement methods, and contamination countermeasures—Central Laboratory scientists drew on fermentation approaches from the discipline of agricultural chemistry, seeing microbes as a way to manufacture essential chemicals locally in conditions of resource scarcity...
