60 Fun Facts About Alexander Fleming

Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and which biochemist?

The Oxford pair turned his laboratory curiosity into a usable drug; Fleming always praised them for it.

Fleming's penicillin came from a mould of which genus?

He first thought it was P. chrysogenum; in 2011 the strain was finally identified as P. rubens.

Fleming discovered the enzyme lysozyme in 1922 in what?

A drop of it cleared a plate of bacteria; his notebook records 'Staphyloid coccus from A.F.'s nose'.

The bacterium Fleming named Micrococcus lysodeikticus was reassigned in 1972 to which species name?

The 'Fleming strain' of it is still a model organism in biology.

In which year was Fleming knighted?

By D-Day that year there was enough penicillin to treat every wounded Allied soldier.

A 2009 STV poll voted Fleming the third greatest Scot, behind Robert Burns and whom?

Time had already put him among the 100 most important people of the twentieth century.

Fleming was born on Lochfield farm near Darvel, in which Scottish county?

He was the third of four children of a farmer's second marriage; his father died when he was seven.

How old was Fleming when his father died?

Hugh Fleming had been 59 when he married Alexander's mother.

Before studying medicine, Fleming spent four years working where?

An inheritance from an uncle and a physician brother's advice sent him to medical school at twenty.

Fleming enrolled in 1901 at which London medical school, where he later discovered penicillin?

The laboratory in Paddington is preserved as a museum.

Fleming joined the research department because a captain wanted to keep him in which sport?

He had been a private in the London Scottish Regiment and was a fine shot.

Fleming became assistant bacteriologist to which pioneer of vaccine therapy?

Wright predicted antibiotic resistance before anyone had seen it in the lab.

Fleming's 1908 BSc, taken with a gold medal, was in which subject?

He lectured at St Mary's until the war and returned as professor of bacteriology in 1928.

During WWI, Fleming's department moved almost wholesale to a military hospital in which French port?

There he watched soldiers die of sepsis despite, and sometimes because of, antiseptics.

Fleming's 1917 Lancet article argued that which treatment was killing more soldiers than infection?

Deep wounds sheltered bacteria while the chemicals destroyed the body's own defences; most army doctors ignored him.

Fleming's ingenious 1917 wound experiment depended on which of his practical skills?

He built glass models of jagged wounds to show where antiseptics could not reach.

V. D. Allison said Fleming would never have made his two great discoveries had he been what?

Fleming teased Allison for his 'excessive tidiness'; contaminated plates were exactly what he expected to find.

To collect tears for the lysozyme experiments, Fleming's lab used what, after onions failed?

For five or six weeks the staff's tears were the only supply.

How much were laboratory attendants paid for each contribution of tears?

The enzyme turned up in sputum, cartilage, blood, pus and egg white too.

The 'patient suffering from acute coryza' in Fleming's 1922 lysozyme paper was later identified as whom?

Coryza is the common cold; the enzyme came out of his own runny nose.

What did Fleming famously remark on seeing the contaminated staphylococcus plate in September 1928?

He had left the plates on a corner bench before his family holiday.

How did the 1936 International Congress of Microbiology react to Fleming's talk on penicillin?

It was the second time he had been met with silence; he bore it stoically and kept working on the drug.

The contaminating mould was traced in 1966 to the room of which colleague, directly below Fleming's lab?

La Touche was the mycologist who first (mis)identified the mould as P. rubrum.

In 2011 Fleming's mould was finally identified as which species?

It had been called notatum and chrysogenum in the intervening decades.

Before settling on the name penicillin in March 1929, Fleming called the substance 'mould juice' or what?

It knocked out staphylococci and the germs of scarlet fever, pneumonia and diphtheria.

Fleming found penicillin useless against which disease, the one he was actually hunting a cure for?

It failed against Gram-negative bacteria, with the odd exception of the gonorrhoea germ.

Fleming's 1929 talk announcing penicillin was titled 'A medium for the isolation of' whose bacillus?

The chairman, Henry Dale, later admitted he had sensed nothing of importance in it.

Fleming published the penicillin discovery in 1929 in which periodical?

It attracted little attention, and the drug 'languished largely forgotten in the 1930s'.

Told in 1940 that Fleming was visiting, an Oxford biochemist said 'Good God! I thought he was' what?

The Oxford team had just published its first results on purifying the drug.

Who was first to propose the correct molecular structure of penicillin?

He worked alongside Chain at Oxford's Dunn School of Pathology.

Norman Heatley's key suggestion was to move penicillin back into water by changing what?

That produced enough of the drug to begin animal tests.

What did the discoverer himself call the myth that he alone was responsible for penicillin?

It grew after The Times covered the 1942 Lambert case and Florey banned his Oxford team from talking to the press.

In 1930 Cecil Paine of Sheffield became the first to cure patients with penicillin. What did he treat?

One adult and three infants with conjunctivitis were cured on 25 November 1930.

In August 1942 Fleming used the Oxford team's penicillin to save Harry Lambert from what?

Sulphonamides had failed; Lambert improved the next day and recovered within a week.

Where did Fleming inject the penicillin that saved Harry Lambert?

The case, published in The Lancet in 1943, convinced the War Cabinet to back mass production.

By D-Day in June 1944 enough penicillin had been produced to treat whom?

The Penicillin Committee had set out to supply the drug exclusively to Allied forces.

Fleming's Nobel lecture warned that if penicillin were sold in shops, the 'ignorant man' might do what?

The first clinical case of penicillin resistance was reported around the same time.

Fleming's first wife Sarah McElroy, whom he married in 1915, was what by profession?

Their only child, Robert, became a general practitioner.

Fleming's second wife, Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, whom he married in 1953, was what?

She worked with him at St Mary's and outlived him by more than thirty years.

How did Fleming react to Americans patenting a penicillin production method in 1944?

'I found penicillin and have given it free for the benefit of humanity,' he complained.

What was the name of Fleming's country home in Suffolk?

He owned it at Barton Mills from 1921 until his death.

Fleming died in London in 1955 of what?

He was 73.

Where are Fleming's ashes buried?

His discovery laboratory in Paddington is preserved as a museum.

Contrary to legend, Churchill's 1943 illness in Carthage was treated not with penicillin but with what?

The story that Fleming's father once saved young Winston is also, in Fleming's words, 'a wondrous fable'.

How did Churchill refer in a radio broadcast to the drug that actually cured him in 1943?

M&B 693 was sulphapyridine, made by May & Baker of Dagenham.

The Sir Alexander Fleming Building, opened in 1998, stands on the South Kensington campus of which university?

St Mary's medical school merged with Imperial in 1988.

Fleming was the third of four children born on a farm to Hugh Fleming and which mother?

Hugh was 59 when he married Grace, his second wife, and already had four surviving children.

Which London college, now the University of Westminster, did the young Fleming attend before medical school?

He won a two-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy first, and later an inheritance from an uncle let him study medicine.

In which volunteer regiment did Fleming serve as a private from 1900 to 1914?

He was later commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps, reached captain in 1917 and was Mentioned in Dispatches.

What did Fleming's only child, Robert, become?

Robert (1924–2015) was presented to the Queen at the 1998 opening of the Sir Alexander Fleming Building at Imperial College.

In which year was Fleming elected Professor of Bacteriology at the University of London?

It was the same year he noticed the mould on his staphylococcus plate at St Mary's.

Fleming's Nobel co-laureate Howard Florey directed which Oxford institution from 1935?

Florey, an Adelaide graduate and Rhodes Scholar, built the team that turned penicillin into a usable drug a decade after Fleming dropped it.

How much money did Ernst Chain reportedly have when he arrived in England from Nazi Germany in April 1933?

J. B. S. Haldane helped him find a post at University College Hospital, and he was naturalised British in 1939.

What did Norman Heatley realise were the ideal vessels for growing penicillin mould in bulk?

The Oxford team's junior member also devised the back-extraction technique for purifying the drug.

What was the profession of Albert Alexander, the first patient treated with penicillin injections in 1941?

He began to recover, but the Oxford team ran out of penicillin by day five, even after recovering some from his urine.

The best mould strain for mass-producing penicillin was found in 1943 on a mouldy cantaloupe in which US city?

The USDA's Northern Regional Research Laboratory there had pioneered deep-tank fermentation using corn steep liquor.

Which two purified penicillins are in clinical use, one injected and one taken by mouth?

Roughly 10% of Americans claim a penicillin allergy, but 90% of them can eventually tolerate it.

Which food is a particularly rich source of lysozyme, the enzyme Fleming discovered in 1922?

Lysozyme breaks down bacterial cell walls and is also abundant in tears, saliva and human milk.

After WWII, Ernst Chain moved to work at a health institute in which city before returning to Britain in 1964?

He then founded the biochemistry department at Imperial College London, specialising in fermentation technologies.

St Mary's Hospital, where Fleming worked, is in which London district?

Founded in 1845, it was the last of the great voluntary hospitals; its medical school merged with Imperial College in 1988.