ALEXANDER FLEMING AND THE DISCOVERY OF PENICILLIN, 1928 Term paper

Alexander Fleming was a Scottish bacteriologist who gained worldwide fame as the discoverer of penicillin, an antibiotic that has saved countless lives since it was first used on a large scale in World War II. However, although Fleming discovered penicillin, the story of its development as a life-saving antibiotic is a complicated one involving the dedicated work of two other researchers, Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

Fleming graduated from St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, London University, in 1906. For several years, he did research. During World War I, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war he conducted research and taught at St. Mary’s.

In 1928, quite by accident, Fleming noticed a mold that had appeared on a culture plate that had not been washed for two weeks because he had been on vacation. He observed that no bacteria grew near the mold, which he named penicillin (after the Latin name for the mold, Penicillium notatum). He experimented further with penicillin, but could neither isolate and identify the compound involved nor produce enough to conduct tests on humans. In 1929 Fleming wrote a paper on his work, then dropped the project. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up Fleming’s work several years later as part of an effort to find an antibacterial substance that was nontoxic to humans. Florey was an Australian. Chain was a German Jew who had been forced to leave Germany in the 1930s. Both were intense and competitive. After years of painstaking work, they were able to isolate the compound and test it. By 1939 they were convinced penicillin was a major pharmaceutical discovery. World War II provided a situation that made it much easier to convince governments to produce penicillin in large quantities. Nevertheless, Florey still had to fly to the United States in 1941 to present his case before the U.S. government would commit the resources needed for mass production. Fleming and Florey were knighted in 1944 for their work. All three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. Over the years that followed, Fleming, because he enjoyed giving interviews, became identified not simply with the discovery of penicillin but also with the work involved in developing it as a useful product. Florey, who avoided journalists whenever possible, and Chain were never given the public recognition they deserved. For decades the romantic myth about Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin obscured the real story. Even now that an accurate account of the discovery and development of penicillin is readily available, the myth persists.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Report on Alexander Fleming’s career up to the point when he discovered penicillin. What kind of a career had he had?
2. Investigate the life of Howard Walter Florey. How did he deal with Alexander Fleming’s great fame and the fact that it rested largely on Florey’s work?
3. What did Florey and Ernst Chain actually do in order to develop penicillin as a life-saving drug?
4. Trace the development of the romantic myth of the discovery of penicillin and evaluate those factors that appear to account for it (begin with Macfarlane’s biography in Suggested Sources).
5. In what ways did World War II accelerate the development and widespread use of penicillin and other drugs? Begin with Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945 and Gwyn Macfarlane’s biography of Howard Florey (see Suggested Sources).
6. Interview one or more medical doctors about the current practices and problems associated with the use of antibiotics today.

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entries for “General Broadcasting of Television in Britain, 1936” (#26), “The Discovery of the Double Helical Structure of DNA, 1953” (#49), and “The Spread of AIDS in the 1980s” (#83). Search under Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Robert Koch, and Sulphonamides.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Source

Florey, H. W., et al. Antibiotics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949. An exposition of the state of knowledge on antibiotics at that time.

Secondary Sources

Boöttcher, Helmuth M. Wonder Drugs: A History of Antibiotics. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964. Somewhat dated, but a very interesting and comprehensive account of efforts before Fleming to discover antibiotics as well as considerable coverage of developments afterwards.

Macfarlane, Gwyn. Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. The best book on the subject.

———. Howard Florey: The Making of a Great Scientist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. An excellent biography of the man instrumental in making penicillin available to the world.

Otfinoski, Steven. Alexander Fleming: Conquering Disease with Penicillin. N.Y.: Facts on File, 1992. A recent, concise discussion.

Parshall, Gerland. “The Masters of Discovery: Medicine’s Accidental Hero.” U.S. News and World Report,17–24 August 1998. A brief, readable account of the contributions of Fleming, Florey, and Chain to the development of penicillin. Wright, Gordon. The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. An excellent history of World War II. Includes useful information on medicine in the war.

World Wide Web

“The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1945.” http://nobel.sdsc.edu/laureates/medicine-1945.html. An excellent site, part of the larger, official Nobel Prize site. It contains links to biographies of Fleming, Florey, and Chain, and a link to the presentation speech. The latter outlines the work done to discover and develop penicillin.