Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin

Hello, my name is Alexander Fleming. I'm a doctor, and just under a hundred years ago, I discovered penicillin. Quite by accident. This is the story of what happened. If you go to the doctor when you're feeling ill, he or she might give you antibiotics to kill the infection. Well, it was me, Alexander Fleming, who discovered the most famous antibiotic of the lot, penicillin. And today, it saves the lives of millions of people all around the world. Before penicillin, there was no way to cure infections, and even a little cut on the knee, if it got badly infected, could turn into something serious enough to kill you. So let me tell you a little bit about me, Alexander Fleming. I was born on a farm in Scotland. My father was a farmer, and my mum was a farmer's daughter, so it's kind of lucky that I didn't become a farmer too. My older brother Thomas became a doctor when he grew up, and I decided that I wanted to follow in his footsteps. So he said, come on Alexander, come to London and study at St Mary's Hospital. It's one of the best hospitals in the country. At St Mary's, I started work in a laboratory, learning everything I could about bacteria and disease, squeezing my syringe of germs into little dishes to see how it grew. My professor, Sir Armroth Wright, was rather strict and scary, but he taught me how to understand germs. And I used to do some really weird experiments. One day, I went to work with a bad cold. Some of my snot accidentally fell into the bacteria dish I was working on. Whoa! That's strange, I thought. My gooey green snot has killed some of the bacteria in the dish. From that, I learned that there is a magic ingredient in our snot, our sweat, and our spit that protects our body from some germs. I call it lysosome. When the First World War broke out in 1914, I went to work in a field hospital on the battlefront, helping soldiers with their horrible wounds and injuries. So many of these poor young men died in hospital rather than on the battlefield from their horribly infected wounds. Their lives could have been saved if only we knew how to fight the infection. Do you know, I'm an untidy kind of person and my lab was always very messy. Old food, manky test tubes, uneaten sandwiches, and dirty lab dishes that I never washed up. But you can tell your mum that being messy can sometimes be a good thing. I left my laboratory in a big old mess when I went off on holiday one summer. Oh, it was nice to be on holiday. I took my wife and our two children and we went off to the seaside and we had a lovely time. When I got back to my lab after the holiday, I noticed that one of my dirty dishes had grown a big blob of Just like if you didn't wash up your cereal bowl, it would go green after a few days. That's funny, I said, and then I saw it. All around the green mould in the dish, the bacteria were dead. That gunky green mould had killed everything near it. The mould was called penicillin and it was amazing. It could kill germs. I was so excited and I ran off to tell all my fellow scientists what I had discovered. But they weren't impressed. Not at all. They weren't interested and they didn't think it could ever work as a medicine. Boring idea. It'll never work. Ten long years went by without anyone noticing my amazing discovery. Until one brilliant man did. And that man was me, Ernst Chain. I am a scientist and I am from Germany. I was working at Oxford University and one day I was flicking through Dr. Fleming's paper about penicillin when I thought, wow, this is an incredible idea. I must call my brilliant Australian friend, Howard Florey. He's a scientist like me here at Oxford and together we can see if this green mould is any good. So the first thing we had to do was find out if this penicillin stuff did actually kill infection. Our patient was a policeman who had scratched his eye on the thorn bush. His eye had become all gooey and green and it looked like he might die. And guess what? The penicillin did work. The infected area around his eye disappeared. Our next question was how can we make lots and lots of penicillin? Penicillin mould needs plenty of air so we started growing it in big dishes and wide bowls and even hospital bedpans. Then we filtered the liquid through some parachute silk to get the pure penicillin. But we did it all by ourselves and we couldn't make enough. We needed to ask some big powerful friends to help us. So we went to America to the companies that make medicine and explain the problem. They agreed to help us make seriously big quantities and we needed to start with the very best quality penicillin mould. Do you know where we found it? On a rotten old melon just like these ones. Maybe you've had one. We added the mould from the melons to big containers full of water and a syrup that comes from corn like this. And then we made it for the mould to grow. We started producing it in factories and we tested it on white rabbits from New Zealand. And when we knew it was safe it was put into bottles and boxes in a factory. And soon we had mountains of it. Enough for everyone. Since that time in 1945 penicillin has become the most often used antibiotic in the world and has saved countless lives. And who do we have to thank? That's right. Let's hear it for Alexander Fleming. I discovered it. Ernst Chain. I knew Dr Fleming's discovery could work. Howard Florey. And I made it into medicine for everyone. Hi everyone. My name's Clarissa. I'm a teacher and I'm a mum and I love general knowledge. If you enjoyed watching our video, please subscribe to our channel and also consider supporting us on Patreon so we can make loads more videos about fascinating people from history, especially for kids.