On 3 September 1928, Scottish doctor and bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to his laboratory. He sorted through a large stack of petri dishes that had accumulated before he had gone away. He noticed that one contained a mould that had killed the bacteria in the dish. In other dishes, the bacteria continued to thrive. ‘That’s funny,’ he thought. He investigated the mould carefully and grew it in a pure culture. He found that it killed a number of bacteria that caused diseases. He called it penicillin. It was the first antibiotic and would transform the treatment of infections and save countless millions of lives. He later said, ‘When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.’
Fleming was born in 1881 in Ayrshire, the son of a farmer. He moved to London at the age of 13 and trained as a doctor. He qualified with distinction in 1906 and began research at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School at the University of London. In 1908, he won the gold medal as the top medical student. In the First World War, Fleming served in the Army Medical Corps and was mentioned in dispatches. He worked as a bacteriologist, studying wound infections. After the war, he returned to St Mary’s.
Fleming published his discovery in 1929, in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, but no one seemed to notice. Through the 1930s, he continued to experiment with penicillin, but found that it was difficult to cultivate in any quantity. Eventually, Australian Howard Florey and Ernst Chain (a refugee from the Nazis in Germany) at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford found a way to mass-produce the antibiotic and it was used widely to save the lives of wounded servicemen in the Second World War.
Fleming wrote many papers on bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy. He became a professor at the University of London. He was knighted in 1944. In 1945, Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Fleming died of a heart attack in 1955.
Welcome the unexpected. Most people would have cleared out all the old petri dishes and ignored a strange mouldy fungus. But Fleming was curious. He seized the serendipitous moment and investigated the unusual occurrence. Great innovators are always inquisitive and see unexpected results as opportunities for learning and discovery.
You cannot do it all on your own. Fleming needed the help of Florey and Chain to turn his discovery into something that could be used for large-scale treatment of diseases. Together, their work has saved millions of lives. Before antibiotics, small infections could lead to amputations or death. Fleming did not keep his discovery to himself. He published it and worked with others to change the world.
Do not be too tidy! Being messy can sometimes help. If Fleming had cleaned all his equipment before leaving for holiday, he would not have discovered penicillin. If everything in your office is neat and tidy, that helps you find things, but you might lose out on the random associations that can sometimes trigger great ideas.