Alexander Fleming and Penicillin
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, September 28th, we’re going to tell the story of one of the luckiest dirty dishes in the history of the world.
A dish that should have been washed up.
A dish that wasn’t washed up.
A dish that somebody had left lying around in Paddington.
And because it was left lying around, millions of people who would otherwise have died, didn’t.
That’ll do for an opening.
We’re at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. September 1928.
And our man is Alexander Fleming.
Scottish. Small. Quiet. Unshowy. Not exactly a natural-born showman.
But look closely because this is one of those moments when history doesn’t come marching in with trumpets and banners.
History comes floating in through a window.
As mould.
Fleming had been away on holiday.
Before going away he’d been growing colonies of staphylococci in Petri dishes. Staphylococci being bacteria capable of causing all manner of deeply unpleasant infections.
And Fleming, let’s just say, was not the tidiest man ever to put on a laboratory coat.
When he came back, one of those dishes had been contaminated.
Normally that’s bad news.
You throw it away.
Start again.
But Fleming looked.
And looked again.
There was mould growing in the dish.
And around that mould there was something extraordinary.
A clear area.
The bacteria had disappeared.
Something produced by that mould was killing them.
Now stop there.
Because that’s the moment.
September 28th, 1928.
A scientist standing in a laboratory at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington looking at a grubby little dish.
No thunderclap.
No choir of angels.
No voice booming down from the heavens, ‘Alexander, old son, you’ve just changed medicine forever.’
Just Fleming noticing something.
And that word, noticing, matters.
Because accidents happen all the time.
The trick is recognising the important accident when it happens.
Which brings us beautifully to today’s word.
Serendipity.
A lovely word.
And, pleasingly, a London word.
It was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, of Strawberry Hill fame, from an old tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes were constantly making discoveries by accident and sagacity.
Accident and sagacity.
There you have Fleming in four words.
The accident was the mould.
The sagacity was Fleming seeing what it meant.
And there’s another wonderful ingredient in the story.
The London weather.
Had it been hotter, things might have turned out differently.
While Fleming was away, London had a spell of relatively cool weather. That appears to have given the invading mould a chance to get established before the bacteria really got going.
Then temperatures rose.
The bacteria grew.
Except around the mould.
In other words, British weather, normally accused of ruining holidays, may have helped to give us penicillin.
You can almost see the headline.
LONDON WEATHER DOES SOMETHING USEFUL.
Hold the front page.
And Fleming called the antibacterial substance produced by the mould ‘penicillin’.
From Penicillium, the mould.
But here’s where we need to be careful with the heroic version of the story.
Fleming spotted it.
That was the great insight.
But he did not single-handedly turn that observation into the medicine that transformed the world.
That took years.
And it took other scientists.
Most importantly Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their colleagues at Oxford, who worked out how to develop, purify and produce penicillin as a practical drug.
So Fleming finds the door.
Others work out how to open it.
And eventually how to get millions of people through it.
But back to Fleming.
Because even the fact that he was there, at St Mary’s, has a lovely dollop of chance about it.
As a young man he had originally intended to become a surgeon.
He was also a very good shot.
Rifle shooting.
And St Mary’s had a rifle club.
The club did not particularly want to lose one of its best marksmen.
So one of those tiny turns of the wheel helped keep Alexander Fleming at St Mary’s.
Think about that.
A rifle.
A holiday.
Some cool London weather.
A stray mould spore.
An untidy laboratory.
And a man intelligent enough to stop and look.
History is sometimes built like that.
Not brick upon brick.
More like a pinball machine.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
And suddenly the world has changed.
Fleming already knew exactly how desperately the world needed something like penicillin.
He had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War.
And he had seen men survive the battlefield wound only to die afterwards from infection.
That was the nightmare.
Today we live in a world where antibiotics are so familiar that it’s difficult to imaginatively cross the border into the world before them.
A cut could kill you.
A scratch could kill you.
Pneumonia could kill you.
Childbirth could kill you.
An infected tooth could become terrifying.
Surgery had a lethal second act.
The operation might succeed.
Then infection arrived.
And that was that.
Penicillin changed the odds.
Not immediately, of course.
Fleming’s 1928 discovery initially attracted surprisingly little attention.
Years passed.
Then came Florey and Chain.
And then came another war.
And suddenly this wasn’t an interesting laboratory curiosity.
It was desperately needed medicine.
Production had to be scaled up.
Fast.
There still wasn’t enough of it.
Early penicillin was so precious that doctors sometimes recovered it from patients’ urine so it could be purified and used again.
That’s how valuable it was.
Imagine having a medicine that works and having to decide who gets it because there simply isn’t enough.
That’s the world we’re in.
And then industrial production kicks in.
And penicillin begins doing what penicillin does.
Saving lives on a colossal scale.
By 1945 Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Quite right too.
But Fleming became the great public face of the story.
The little Scotsman in the Paddington laboratory.
The mouldy dish.
The miracle drug.
He was knighted.
Honoured around the world.
And one of my favourite details comes from America.
In 1946 members of the Kiowa nation honoured him and made him an honorary chief.
His name was Doy-Gei-Taun.
‘Maker of Great Medicine.’
Hard to improve on that.
Fleming, incidentally, was very clear that the public story had become tidier than the real one.
People like lone geniuses.
They like eureka moments.
They like history with one hero standing under a spotlight.
Science isn’t usually like that.
Discovery is messy.
Collaborative.
Incremental.
Somebody notices something.
Somebody else understands another part of it.
Another team solves a technical problem.
Somebody finds a way to manufacture it.
And eventually the thing that began as a contaminated Petri dish becomes medicine in hospitals all over the world.
That’s a much better story because it’s true.
And Fleming’s London story carries on.
He lived for many years at 20 Danvers Street in Chelsea.
And when he died in 1955, he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Think of that journey.
A Scottish farm boy.
Medical student in London.
St Mary’s Hospital.
A mouldy dish in Paddington.
And eventually St Paul’s Cathedral.
There’s one last detail I rather like.
Fame came.
Honours came.
The Nobel Prize came.
The whole world knew his name.
But when his estate was proved after his death, the figure was £29,321 10 shillings and 9 pence.
Call it somewhere around a million pounds in today’s money, depending on which comparison you use.
Comfortable.
Certainly.
But this was the man whose observation helped create one of the most commercially and medically valuable discoveries in human history.
And perhaps that’s a useful corrective to the modern assumption that great discoveries inevitably turn their discoverers into billionaires.
Fleming got something else.
His name attached permanently to one of the great turning points in medicine.
And, appropriately enough, the story ends where it began.
With looking.
Because anybody could have thrown that dish away.
Probably almost everybody would have.
Contaminated.
Spoiled.
Useless.
Bin it.
Fleming didn’t.
He looked at the thing that had gone wrong and asked why.
That’s the real magic.
Not the mould.
Not even the penicillin.
The look.
September 28th, 1928.
St Mary’s Hospital.
Paddington.
A little dish.
A patch of mould.
A clear ring where the bacteria had died.
And one human being paying attention.
Serendipity.
Accident plus sagacity.
Sometimes changing the world begins with noticing the thing everybody else would have thrown away.
London Calling. London Walks connecting.
Streets ahead.