How Alexander Fleming Accidentally Discovered Penicillin

How Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin. Alexander Fleming was born into a modest Scottish sheep farming family in 1881. He excelled in school and entered St. Mary's Hospital in London to study medicine. He developed a reputation as a brilliant researcher. His chance discovery of penicillin in 1928 has become a legend. At the time Fleming was doing research on microbes. He was a very untidy person and in August he went on holiday without cleaning his laboratory first. As a result he left plates of bacteria culture in the laboratory next to an open window. And they stayed there for two hot summer weeks. While he was away fungus spores blown in from the street contaminated one of his culture's plates. And when Fleming returned from his holiday he noticed that a mould had grown on that plate. He was about to wash the plate and suddenly something else caught his eye. Something truly extraordinary. The mould had destroyed all the bacteria that were around it. Fleming had just discovered entirely by accident the first antibiotic. And this discovery was destined to revolutionize medicine. Fleming immediately realized the importance of this antibacterial substance. And as the mould belonged to the penicillium family of fungi he named it penicillin. He investigated the effects of penicillin on the bacteria causing pneumonia, syphilis, meningitis, diphtheria, gangrene and other deadly infections. He published his findings in 1929 but little attention was paid to the article. Moreover his penicillin experiments encountered serious difficulties because it was difficult to mass-produce penicillin in sufficient quantities. Consequently Fleming abandoned his research. But 11 years later in 1940 two other brilliant scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain started new penicillin experiments and demonstrated the miraculous effects of penicillin injections. After the outbreak of World War II the British government and US pharmaceutical companies started the mass production of penicillin in order to treat all the Allied forces. By the end of World War II it had saved millions of lives and the legend of Fleming the hero grew. In 1945 Fleming, Florey and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. Penicillin and antibiotics generally are now recognized as the most efficient life-saving drug ever discovered. Thanks to antibiotics most bacterial infections are now treatable. However as early as 1946 Fleming recognized that there was a problem with penicillin. He wrote, the administration of too small doses leads to the production of resistant strains of bacteria. This problem of antibiotic resistant microbes plagues us to this day.