Fleming, Alexander, Sir, 1881-1955

Sir Alexander Fleming; 6 August 1881, Darvel, East Ayrshire, Scotland; 11 March 1955 (aged 73), London, England; Fleming went to Loudoun Moor School and Darvel School, and earned a two-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London, where he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution; After working in a shipping office for four years, the twenty-year-old Alexander Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming; enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington; he qualified with an MBBS degree from the school with distinction in 1906; Fleming had been a private in the London Scottish Regiment of the Volunteer Force since 1900; join the research department at St Mary's, where he became assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy and immunology. In 1908, he gained a BSc degree with Gold Medal in Bacteriology, and became a lecturer at St Mary's until 1914. Fleming served throughout World War I as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and was Mentioned in Dispatches. He and many of his colleagues worked in battlefield hospitals at the Western Front in France. In 1918 he returned to St Mary's Hospital, where he was elected Professor of Bacteriology of the University of London in 1928. In 1951 he was elected the Rector of the University of Edinburgh for a term of three years; During World War I, Fleming witnessed the death of many soldiers from sepsis resulting from infected wounds. Antiseptics, which were used at the time to treat infected wounds, often worsened the injuries; Sir Almroth Wright strongly supported Fleming's findings; On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent August on holiday with his family. Before leaving, he had stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner of his laboratory. On returning, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci immediately surrounding the fungus had been destroyed, whereas other staphylococci colonies farther away were normal, famously remarking "That's funny"; Fleming grew the mould in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. He identified the mould as being from the genus Penicillium, and, after some months of calling it "mould juice", named the substance it released penicillin on 7 March 1929; The laboratory in which Fleming discovered and tested penicillin is preserved as the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington; In the 1930s, Fleming's trials occasionally showed more promise, but Fleming largely abandoned penicillin work, leaving Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford to take up research to mass-produce it, with funds from the U.S. and British governments. They started mass production after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. By D-Day in 1944, enough penicillin had been produced to treat all the wounded in the Allied forces; Fleming's accidental discovery and isolation of penicillin in September 1928 marks the start of modern antibiotics; His alma mater, St Mary's Hospital Medical School, merged with Imperial College London in 1988. The Sir Alexander Fleming Building on the South Kensington campus was opened in 1998, where his son Robert and his great granddaughter Claire were presented to the Queen; it is now one of the main preclinical teaching sites of the Imperial College School of Medicine; His other alma mater, the Royal Polytechnic Institution (now the University of Westminster) has named one of its student halls of residence Alexander Fleming House, which is near to Old Street; Fleming, Florey and Chain jointly received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945; Fleming was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.; Fleming was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1943; Fleming was awarded the Hunterian Professorship by the Royal College of Surgeons of England; Fleming was knighted, as a Knight Bachelor, by king George VI in 1944; He was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise in 1948; In 1999, Time magazine named Fleming one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century; The importance of his work was recognized by the placement of an International Historic Chemical Landmark plaque at the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in London on November 19, 1999; When 2000 was approaching, at least three large Swedish magazines ranked penicillin as the most important discovery of the millennium; In 2002, Fleming was named in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a nationwide vote; A statue of Alexander Fleming stands outside the main bullring in Madrid, Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas. It was erected by subscription from grateful matadors, as penicillin greatly reduced the number of deaths in the bullring; Flemingovo náměstí is a square named after Fleming in the university area of the Dejvice community in Prague; A secondary school is named after him in Sofia, Bulgaria; In Athens, a small square in the downtown district of Votanikos is named after Fleming and bears his bust. There are also a number of Streets in greater Athens and other towns in Greece named after either Fleming or his Greek second wife Amalia; In mid-2009, Fleming was commemorated on a new series of banknotes issued by the Clydesdale Bank; his image appears on the new issue of £5 notes; In 2009, Fleming was voted third greatest Scot in an opinion poll conducted by STV, behind only Scotland's national poet Robert Burns and national hero William Wallace; 91006 Fleming, an asteroid in the Asteroid Belt, is named after Fleming; Fleming station, on the Thessaloniki Metro system, takes its name from Fleming Street on which it is located, which in term is named after him; Sir Alexander Fleming College, a British school in Trujillo, northern Perú; married Sarah Marion McElroy had child Robert Fleming; after her death married Dr. Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas