MPK | Alexander Fleming discovery | Alexander Fleming contribution | Alexander Fleming invention

 

MPK | Alexander Fleming discovery | Alexander Fleming contribution | Alexander Fleming invention

a great breakthrough came in the field of chemotherapy when a new chemotherapeutic agent was reported to the medical world. It was 1928, when the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, working in St.Mary’s Hospital Medical Center London, accidently discovered the antibacterial action of cultures of a mold Penicillium  notatum. Fleming observed that a culture of the bacterium Staphylococcus  aureus growing on agar medium was accidently contaminated with spores  of the mold producing tufted  green colonies.

                                                        Discovery of Penicillin

 A contaminated culture is of no use to a microbiologist, so Fleming was about to throw the ruined plates away when he noticed that the mold seemed to be limiting the growth of the bacteria. In fact, on closer observation, he saw that it was dissolving the microorganisms. This was something very serendipitous event as described by Fleming in the British Journal of experimental pathology: while working with Staphylococcal variants a number of culture plates were set aside on the laboratory bench and examined from time to time. In the examinations these plates were necessarily exposed to the air and they become contaminated with various microorganism.

Fleming performed a series of controlled experiments to prove his claim to the skeptical scientific community. After growing a pure strain of Penicillium, Fleming filtered off fluid produced by the mold and added it to thriving cultures of Staphylococcus  aureus. The killing agent in the fluid was so strong that Fleming could actually see the bacteria disappearing from the scene. Even when diluted to one hundredth of its original strength, it still destroyed bacterial colonies. He studied the antibacterial potential of the killing agent and found that the agent would kill a variety of harmful bacteria, not just Staphylococci. 

Further, his experimental work revealed that it did not cause any injurious effect on the human tissue, and it imparted no harmful side effects when given the fluid to mice and rabbits. Fleming called the fluid, which was the world’s first antibiotic, Penicillin.

Effective against more than 100 different kinds of bacteria, including those responsible for pneumonia, syphilis, and gonorrhea, penicillin has been called the single most important discovery in the battle against disease.

All three men Fleming, Florey, and Chain, were included in the award of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1945