Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) was a Scottish physician and microbiologist whose discovery of penicillin opened the age of antibiotics. Raised on a farm in Ayrshire, he moved to London and trained in medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School. Studying wound infections in France during the First World War, he saw how often antiseptics failed to prevent infection, and he resolved to find better ways to fight bacteria. In 1921 he discovered lysozyme, an antibacterial enzyme in tears and saliva. His turning point came in September 1928, when he noticed that a mold contaminating one of his culture plates had stopped the growth of the surrounding bacteria; he named the active substance penicillin. Developed into a practical medicine by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in the 1940s, it has since saved millions of lives, and the three shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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Pioneers of Vaccines and Antibiotics
Edward Jenner introduced vaccination against smallpox in 1796, using material from cowpox. Louis Pasteur developed vaccines against anthrax and rabies and proposed extending the word vaccine to all such protections in Jenner's honor. Paul Ehrlich, seeking a 'magic bullet' against disease, developed Salvarsan (1910), often called the first modern chemotherapeutic drug. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, and Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, announced in 1955, was never patented.
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