Sir Alexander Fleming (6 August, 1881 – 11 March, 1955) was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist. He wrote many articles on bacteriology, immunology, and chemotherapy. His best-known discoveries are the discovery of the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the antibiotic substance penicillin 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 Chain.

Early life

Fleming was born on August 6, 1881 at Lochfield, a farm near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the third of the four children of 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 (known as Alec) was seven.

Fleming went to Loudoun Moor School and Darvel School, and though the two before were modest schools at best, earned a two-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London where he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution.[4] After working in a shipping office for four years, the twenty-year-old Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming. His elder brother, Tom, was already a physician and suggested to his younger sibling that he follow the same career, and so in 1903, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London. He qualified for the school with distinction in 1906 and had the option of becoming a surgeon.

By chance, however, he had been a member of the rifle club (he had been an active member of the Volunteer Force since 1900). The captain of the club, wishing to retain Fleming in the team 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. He gained an M.B. and then a B.Sc. with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary's until 1914. On 23 December 1915, Fleming married a trained nurse, Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, County Mayo, Ireland.

Fleming served throughout World War I as a captain 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. In 1918 he returned to St. Mary's Hospital, which was a teaching hospital. He was elected Professor of Bacteriology in 1928.

In 1955, Fleming died at his home in London of a heart attack. He was cremated and his ashes interred in St Paul's Cathedral a week later.

Honours, awards and achievements

His discovery of penicillin had changed the world of modern medicine by introducing the age of useful antibiotics; penicillin has saved, and is still saving, millions of people around the world.

The laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London where Fleming discovered penicillin is home to the Fleming Museum. There is also a school in the city Lomita in Los Angeles County, California named Alexander Fleming Middle School. The University of Westminster has named one of its student buildings located near Old Street in honour of Fleming and Imperial College also has a building named after him, the Sir Alexander Fleming Building. It is based in the South Kensington campus and is the site of much of the preclinical undergraduate medical teaching.

* Fleming, Florey and Chain jointly received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945. According to the rules of the Nobel committee a maximum of three people may share the prize. Fleming's Nobel Prize medal was acquired by the National Museums of Scotland in 1989, and will be on display when the Royal Museum re-opens in 2011.

* Fleming was awarded the Hunterian Professorship by the Royal College of Surgeons of England

* Fleming and Florey were knighted in 1944.

* Florey went on to be elected President of the Royal Society in 1943 and received the greater honour of a peerage in 1965 for his monumental work in making penicillin available to the public and saving millions of lives in World War II, becoming a Baron.

* When 2000 was approaching, at least three large Swedish magazines ranked penicillin as the most important discovery of the millennium. Some of these magazines estimated that about 200 million lives have been saved by this discovery.[citation needed]

* A statue of Alexander Fleming stands outside the main bullring in Madrid, 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.

* In mid-2009, Fleming was commemorated on a new series of banknotes issued by the Clydesdale Bank; his image appears on the new issue of £5 notes.