On 6th August 1881 Sir Alexander Fleming, the Nobel prize-winning bacteriologist, was born at his parents’ farm located near Darvel, Ayrshire.
His parents, Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton, were both from farming families. His father’s health was fragile; he died when Alexander was just seven years old.
Alexander’s earliest schooling, between the ages of five and eight, was at a tiny moorland school where 12 pupils of all ages were taught in a single classroom.
Darvel School was Alexander’s next school, which involved an eight-mile round trip on foot every school-day. At the age of 11 his academic potential was recognized and he was awarded a scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy, where he boarded for about two years before leaving for London.
Alexander arrived in London early in 1895, age 13 and lived in the home of his elder brother, Tom, who was a doctor of medicine. Most of the Fleming family ended up living with Tom, leaving the eldest brother, Hugh, running the farm.
Alexander attended the Polytechnic School, where he studied business and commerce. He started in a class appropriate to his age, but his teachers soon realized he needed more challenging work. He was moved into a class with boys two years older than him and finished school at the age of 16.
He took up a research position at St Mary's Hospital Medical School at the University of London under Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy. In World War One Fleming served in the Army Medical Corps and was mentioned in dispatches. After the war, he returned to St Mary's.
In 1928, while studying influenza, Fleming noticed that mould had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococci germ. The mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. Fleming experimented further and named the active substance penicillin. It was two other scientists however, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who developed penicillin further so that it could be produced as a drug. At first supplies of penicillin were very limited, but by the 1940s it was being mass-produced by the American drugs industry.
Fleming wrote numerous papers on bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy. He was elected professor of the medical school in 1928 and emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of London in 1948. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1943 and knighted in 1944. In 1945 Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
