The man who saved two hundred million lives
Alexander Fleming was born on 6 August 1881 at Lochfield Farm near Darvel in Ayrshire, the seventh of eight children of a hill farmer. The farm sat high on the moorland above the Irvine Valley, and the young Fleming spent his childhood roaming the fields and burns of rural Ayrshire — an upbringing that, he later said, taught him the habit of careful observation that would serve him in the laboratory.
Fleming moved to London at the age of thirteen to join his elder brother, worked as a shipping clerk, and then used a small inheritance to study medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington. He qualified as a surgeon in 1906 but was drawn to bacteriology, joining the research department of Almroth Wright, one of the pioneers of vaccine therapy. During the First World War, Fleming served in field hospitals on the Western Front, where he witnessed the horrific toll of infected wounds and became convinced that the antiseptics then in use were doing more harm than good — killing the body's own defences while failing to reach the deep-seated bacteria.
The discovery that changed the world came on 3 September 1928, when Fleming returned to his laboratory after a summer holiday and noticed that a mould — Penicillium notatum — had contaminated one of his staphylococcus culture plates. Around the mould, the bacteria had been killed. Fleming investigated, isolated the active substance, and named it penicillin. He published his findings in 1929, but the scientific community was slow to grasp the significance. It was not until Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at Oxford developed a method of mass-producing penicillin in the early 1940s that its potential was realised.
Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Florey and Chain. The impact of their work is almost impossible to overstate — penicillin and the antibiotics that followed have saved an estimated two hundred million lives and transformed surgery, childbirth, and the treatment of infectious disease. Fleming, characteristically modest, always emphasised the role of chance in his discovery: "One sometimes finds what one is not looking for." He died in London in 1955 and is buried in St Paul's Cathedral. The farm in Ayrshire where he was born — where a boy's sharp eye for the natural world was first cultivated — still stands in the hills above Darvel.