BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — As the world shelters in place to await the retraction of the Coronavirus/COVID-19 epidemic, the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) recalls a past water polo athlete who made his own mark in medicine with mold.
Although a multitude of physicians, pharmacists, nurses and other practitioners of the medical arts have come through the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) and its member schools, this individual never dove in to compete against a team in the United States – but rather made his mark in Europe with petri dishes rather than pools.
A Scottish biologist, physician, microbiologist, and pharmacologist, Sir/Dr. Alexander Fleming is known for the discovery of the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the world’s first antibiotic substance benzylpenicillin (Penicillin G) from the mold Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.
Knighted for his scientific achievements in 1944 during the midst of World War II, his discovery of Penicillin earned him a spot on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century in 1999 and in 2009 he was also voted third “greatest Scot” in an opinion poll behind only poet Robert Burns and revolutionary William Wallace (i.e Braveheart for fans of the movie).
Born on August 6, 1881 at Lochfield farm near Darvel, in Ayrshire, Scotland, Alexander was the third of four children of farmer Hugh Fleming (1816–1888) from his second marriage to Grace Stirling Morton (1848–1928), the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. Hugh Fleming had four surviving children from his first marriage. He was 59 at the time of his second marriage, and died when Alexander was seven.
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. His elder brother, Tom, was already a physician and suggested to him that he should follow the same career, and so in 1903, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in Paddington; he qualified with an MBBS degree from the school with distinction in 1906.
But how does water polo come into play?
As a 16-year-old, Fleming played water polo for the London Scottish Regiment of the Volunteer Force and found himself competing against St Mary’s Hospital, situated on the north side of Hyde Park. When Fleming decided to attend medical school a few years later, he chose St Mary’s because it was the only one that he had ever come into contact with due to having played them in water polo.
In addition, Fleming – who served as a private with the London Scottish Regiment for 14 years from 1900-to-1914, was also a member of the rifle club at the medical school. The captain of the club, wishing to retain Fleming on the team and prevent him from going to another school, suggested that he 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. Commissioned lieutenant in 1914 and promoted captain in 1917, Fleming served throughout World War I 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.
It was during his days in the trenches that he discovered that the antiseptic treatments utilized worked well on the surface, but deep wounds tended to shelter anaerobic bacteria from the antiseptic agent, and antiseptics seemed to remove beneficial agents produced that protected the patients in these cases at least as well as they removed bacteria, and did nothing to remove the bacteria that were out of reach. The discovery would lead him into his historic line of medicine.
In 1918 he returned to St Mary’s Hospital and history was made.
At St Mary’s Hospital Fleming continued his investigations into antibacterial substances. In 1922, a tear accidentally fell from Fleming’s eye on to a bacterial culture. The next day, he was astonished to find that the place where the teardrop had fallen was free from bacteria. Expounding on his research, he tested the nasal secretions from a patient with a heavy cold and found they too had an inhibitory effect on bacterial growth. This was the first recorded discovery of lysozyme, an enzyme present in many secretions including tears, saliva, skin, hair and nails as well as mucus. Although he was able to obtain larger amounts of lysozyme from egg whites, the enzyme was only effective against small counts of harmless bacteria, and therefore had little therapeutic potential.
Elected Professor of Bacteriology of the University of London, he continued his work.
By 1927 and investigating the properties of staphylococci, he developed a reputation as a brilliant researcher with an untidy laboratory. On September 3, 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent August on holiday with his family. Before leaving for his holiday, 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 showed the contaminated culture to his former assistant Merlin Pryce, who reminded him, “That’s how you discovered lysozyme.” Fleming grew the mold in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. He identified the mold as being from the genus Penicillium, and, after some months of calling it “mold juice”, named the substance it released “Penicillin” on March 7, 1929.[16] The laboratory in which Fleming discovered and tested penicillin is preserved as the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington.
He investigated his “mold juice” against a number of organisms – including scarlet fever, pneumonia, meningitis, diphtheria and gonorrhoea – but not typhoid fever or paratyphoid fever for which he was looking for a cure/remedy in his studies.
Fleming published his discovery in 1929, in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, but little attention was paid to his article. He thought the problem of producing it in quantity – and because its action appeared to be rather slow – penicillin would not be important in treating infection. Fleming also became convinced that penicillin would not last long enough in the human body to kill bacteria effectively. Many clinical tests were inconclusive, probably because it had been used as a surface antiseptic. In the 1930s, Fleming’s trials occasionally showed more promise, but Fleming largely abandoned penicillin work, leaving Florey and Chain at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford to take up research to mass-produce it, with funds from the U.S. and British governments. The duo 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 saving hundreds of thousands of lives just in the period of 1944-to-1945.
Fast forward to today and Fleming’s discovery of penicillin changed the world of modern medicine by introducing the age of useful antibiotics as the drug is still saving millions of people around the world.
For his work, he joined Florey and Chain in jointly receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945, was named to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, was knighted by King George VI in 1944. Further, he was awarded the Medal for Merit by the United States and was made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour by the French Republic.
In 1999, Time magazine named Fleming one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, stating, “It was a discovery that would change the course of history. The active ingredient in that mold, which Fleming named penicillin, turned out to be an infection-fighting agent of enormous potency. When it was finally recognized for what it was, the most efficacious life-saving drug in the world, penicillin would alter forever the treatment of bacterial infections. By the middle of the century, Fleming’s discovery had spawned a huge pharmaceutical industry, churning out synthetic penicillins that would conquer some of mankind’s most ancient scourges, including syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis.” Further, three Swedish magazines ranked penicillin as the most important discovery of the millennium.
His lifestory continued long after his death on March 11, 1955 of a heart attack at his home in London and the internment of his ashes St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Although honored in life, his post-mortem honors include:
- A statue of Alexander Fleming stands outside the main bullring in Madrid (Spain), 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.
So from humble beginnings – and competing in water polo – Alexander Fleming molded a mark which continues to reap benefits for humanity to this day.
