Alexander Fleming

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Sir Alexander Fleming. A picture containing text person person white Description automatically generated.

Fleming had a genius for technical ingenuity and original observation. His work on wound infection and lysozyme , an antibacterial enzyme found in tears and saliva, guaranteed him a place in the history of bacteriology . Fleming was recognized for that achievement in 1945, when he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Australian pathologist Howard Walter Florey and German-born British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain , both of whom isolated and purified penicillin..

Education and early career. Fleming was the seventh of eight children of a Scottish hill farmer (third of four children from the farmer’s second wife)..

H e won the 1908 gold medal as top medical student at the University of London . The Inoculation Department at St. Mary’s Hospital convinced him that his future lay in the new field of bacteriology There he came under the influence of bacteriologist and immunologist Sir Almroth Edward Wright , whose ideas of vaccine therapy seemed to offer a revolutionary direction in medical treatment..

Discovery of penicillin. Discovery of penicillin.

Very much the lone researcher with an eye for the unusual, Fleming had the freedom to pursue anything that interested him T he therapeutic development of penicillin required multidisciplinary teamwork. Fleming, working with two young researchers, failed to stabilize and purify penicillin..

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Death. In 1949 his first wife, who had changed her name to Sareen, died. For the last decade of his life, Fleming was feted universally for his discovery of penicillin and acted as a world ambassador for medicine and science ..

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