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Alexander Fleming

ALEXANDER FLEMING

1881 - 1955

Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, was born in 1881 in Lochfield, Scotland. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at St. Mary's Hospital in London, he worked in research on immune phenomena and their causes. Later on, he became a doctor in the army in World War I. He studied wound infection and noticed that many antiseptics harmed The cells of the body are more than their effect on microbes, so he realized that what medicine needs is a substance that affects bacteria and does not harm the cells of the body.

After the war, Fleming returned to St. Mary's Hospital, and in 1922, while he was doing research there, he discovered a substance he called (lysozyme), which was produced by the human body and was composed of Mucous and tears, which are not harmful to human cells, but kill some microbes, but those microbes were not, unfortunately, microbes harmful to humans, so this was the first discovery, although it was interesting, but it was not of serious importance.

In 1928, Fleming was able to accomplish his great discovery. The culture of bacteria in his laboratory was exposed to contamination by a fungus. Fleming noticed that in the vicinity of the fungus the bacteria had disappeared, so he concluded that the fungus was a toxic and lethal substance for bacteria. Soon he was able to discover that the same substance was preventing the growth of several Other types of harmful bacteria. This substance, which he called penicillin (after the fungus), was harmless to human beings or animals.

Fleming's results were published in 1929, but they did not receive any attention first. Fleming had suggested that penicillin could be used in medicine. However, he himself was not able to explain a technical method for purifying penicillin, and he remained for ten years without using this magic drug.

Finally, at the end of the thirties, it happened that two British medical researchers read Fleming's article on penicillin, namely (Howard Florey and Ernest Chen), so they repeated his experiments and verified their validity, and after that they deliberately purified penicillin and experimented with this substance on laboratory animals, and in 1945 they tried penicillin on human patients Their experiments showed that this new drug was amazingly effective.

With the encouragement of the British and American governments, pharmaceutical companies entered the field and quickly revealed ways to produce penicillin in large quantities. Penicillin was first kept for use in cases of military injuries during the war, but in 1944 it became accessible for use by civilians in Britain and America. When the war ended in 1945, use spread throughout the world. Penicillin In all, the discovery of penicillin encouraged research to discover other germicides, and this research is the reason for the discovery of other magic drugs. Nevertheless, penicillin remains the first, most widespread and used germicide.

And one of the reasons that made its use continuous and prevalent is that it is effective and effective against many types of harmful microorganisms and is used in the treatment of syphilis, gonorrhea, scarlet fever and diphtheria, as well as some forms of arthritis, bronchitis, meningitis, blood poisoning, boils, osteitis, chest infections, gangrene and many other diseases.

There is another benefit of penicillin, which is the broad limit of the possibility of healing by using it. Doses of 50,000 units of penicillin are able to cure some diseases, but cyanosis with a strength of (100) million units per day has been given without any bad results. It really turns out that there are some people who have it. Against penicillin, but their percentage is very small. In the vast majority of people penicillin works successfully in restoring their ability and health. And since penicillin has saved the lives of millions of human beings, therefore, this increases the importance of Fleming, but he shares this honor (Flory and Chen), but the author believes that the credit is due to Fleming, without whom several years of sensitivity would have passed before the discovery of penicillin.

Fleming had a happy and successful marriage and had one child. In 1945, the Nobel Prize was awarded to him jointly with (Flory and Chen), and Fleming died in 1955.