59 Fun Facts About Alexander Fleming

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

Ernst Chain: the Berlin-trained chemist left for England in 1933 when the Nazis took power, and at Oxford he and Florey purified the drug that Fleming had been unable to stabilise.

Fleming's penicillin belongs to which family of medicines?

Antibiotics: penicillin kills bacteria but has no effect on viruses, which is why a doctor won't prescribe it for a cold.

Fleming first found the enzyme lysozyme at work in a sample of what?

His own nasal mucus: he had a cold, and germs dissolved around the blob he put on a culture plate, yet the enzyme proved too weak against the bacteria that make people seriously ill.

Which group put up the monument to Fleming unveiled in 1964, in thanks for penicillin?

Bullfighters: infected wounds had killed so many matadors that their benevolent society raised the money, and its bronze matador now doffs his hat to Fleming's bust outside Madrid's Las Ventas bullring.

Which British monarch knighted Fleming?

George VI: the wartime king knighted Fleming in 1944 and gave the same honour that year to Howard Florey, the Oxford professor whose team had turned the mould into a usable drug.

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

William Wallace took second, so the top three were a poet, a medieval warrior and a bacteriologist, with Fleming finishing ahead of Robert the Bruce.

Fleming was born on Lochfield farm near Darvel, in which county that was also the birthplace of Robert Burns?

Ayrshire: he went to the village school in Darvel and then to Kilmarnock Academy, before leaving the hills as a teenager to join a brother in London.

Whose death hit the Fleming family farm when Alexander was seven?

Father: he died, leaving a widow and eight children from two marriages; Alexander was the second youngest of them.

Before studying medicine, Fleming spent four years working where?

A shipping office kept him as a junior clerk for four years, until a legacy from an uncle let him walk out and start medical school.

Fleming is said to have chosen St Mary's medical school because he had once played against it at which sport?

Water polo: he is said to have picked St Mary's over the other London schools within reach simply because he had once played a match against its team.

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

Rifle shooting: the hospital club's captain wanted to keep a crack shot on the team, so he talked Fleming into a laboratory post, and Fleming stayed in that department for the rest of his career.

Fleming became assistant bacteriologist to which pioneer of vaccine therapy?

Almroth Wright was famous enough to be the model for the hero of Bernard Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma, and Fleming stayed in his department for the rest of his working life.

Fleming passed the exams to qualify in which branch of medicine but never practised it, staying in the laboratory instead?

Surgery: he meant to become a surgeon and passed the Royal College of Surgeons fellowship in 1909, but by then the laboratory had claimed him.

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

Boulogne: his department chief set up an army laboratory there to study infected wounds, and Fleming spent the war in it as a medical officer, working out why so many casualties died.

Fleming's wartime research in France showed that which routine treatment of wounded soldiers was doing more harm than good?

Antiseptics damaged the white blood cells that fight infection, yet never reached the bacteria sheltering deep inside a jagged wound.

Fleming built much of the apparatus for his own experiments thanks to which practical skill?

Glassblowing: during the First World War he made an 'artificial war wound' out of glass, a tube drawn out into deep pits like the recesses of a shrapnel wound, to test whether any wash could reach the germs inside them.

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

Tidier: Fleming let old culture plates pile up on his bench for weeks and looked each one over before throwing it out, which is how both chance finds caught his eye.

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

Lemons: the staff squeezed a scrap of peel in front of an open eye and sucked up the tears with a fine glass tube, and for five or six weeks their own weeping was the only supply.

Before penicillin, Fleming ran a lucrative private practice injecting the new drug Salvarsan against which disease?

Syphilis: his chief distrusted chemical cures yet handed him samples of Paul Ehrlich's new compound, and Fleming became one of the first doctors in Britain to inject it.

Fleming belonged to the Chelsea Arts Club and made pictures using what in place of paint?

Colourful microbes: he sketched with species that grow in different pigments, then incubated his work until the hidden picture bloomed into view.

What is Fleming said to have remarked on seeing the contaminated staphylococcus plate in September 1928?

'That's funny' is the line the story gives him; the plate had sat out on the bench instead of going into the incubator, which gave the mould time to take hold before the bacteria grew.

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

Nobody believed him: the world's leading bacteriologists gave no support to his idea that the mould might treat human infections and barely discussed it, a snub he took stoically before going back to work.

Where did the mould spore that landed on Fleming's famous 1928 plate most likely come from?

A fungus lab downstairs: on the floor below, a specialist was growing moulds to test whether they caused asthma, and a spore most likely drifted up the stairwell.

Penicillin takes its name, by way of its mould, from the Latin word for which everyday object?

A paintbrush: under the microscope the mould's spore-bearing branches end in brush-like tufts, which is what the Latin penicillus describes.

Before he coined the word penicillin, what homely name did Fleming give his bacteria-killing broth?

Mould juice was the lab's working name for the liquid the fungus had grown in; the grander word came months later, borrowed from the mould's scientific name.

Fleming found that penicillin had no effect on the germ behind which of these diseases?

Typhoid fever is caused by a Gram-negative bacterium, a class whose extra outer membrane blocks penicillin.

What did Fleming first use penicillin for in his own lab?

Weeding germs from cultures: added to a plate it killed the common bacteria and left the hard-to-grow flu bacillus standing, and that bench trick was the headline of his 1929 paper.

How did Oxford's scientists guard their precious mould against wartime loss or theft?

Rubbed it into their coats: spores worked into the cloth would travel unseen, so the strain could be regrown in America.

Told in 1940 that Fleming was coming to visit, an Oxford biochemist is said to have exclaimed 'I thought he was' what?

Dead is the punchline of the tale: Fleming had just read Oxford's first paper on his old mould and rung up to ask if he could come and see the work.

Which quirk of the London weather helped the famous mould take hold on Fleming's plate before the bacteria could?

A cool spell: the mould grows in the cool and the bacteria need warmth, so it got going first, and when warmer days woke the bacteria they met a colony already leaking penicillin.

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

Its acidity: penicillin passed from water into the solvent when the mix was acidic, so Heatley guessed it would pass back if he made it alkaline, and it did.

Why did wartime newspapers credit Fleming alone for penicillin?

Florey barred his team from interviews, so reporters went to the one man who would talk to them, and the lone-genius story stuck for good.

In 1930 Cecil Paine of Sheffield made some of the earliest recorded penicillin cures, using crude mould broth against what?

Eye infections: he rinsed the eyes of newborn babies and a coal miner with raw mould broth and cleared them, but never wrote it up, so the cures went unnoticed for decades.

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

Streptococcal meningitis: every other drug had failed and Lambert was sinking, yet the day after Fleming's first injection of the Oxford supply he began to rally.

Where did Fleming inject the penicillin that saved Harry Lambert?

Into his spinal canal: Florey asked him to wait while Oxford tried that route on a cat, and rang back to say the cat had died, but Fleming had already gone ahead and his patient was recovering.

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

All the Allied wounded: in 1941 America had not held enough penicillin to treat a single patient, yet three years of crash production on both sides of the Atlantic closed the gap in time for the landings.

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

Underdose and breed resistant microbes: he told of a Mr X who half-treats his own sore throat, then passes the hardened germs to his wife, who dies of them. 'If you use penicillin, use enough.'

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

A nurse: Irish-born Sareen, as she was known, owned a private nursing home in London and sold it so that her husband could give his time to research.

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

A Greek colleague: Dr Amalia Koutsouri-Voureka, who had worked in the wartime Greek resistance, came to his St Mary's laboratory on a scholarship and married him two years before he died.

Fleming made keepsake 'mould medallions' for Churchill, Roosevelt and the Queen by sealing mould between two what?

Spectacle lenses: one of his brothers supplied spare ones, so Fleming grew the mould on paper, cut out a disc and sealed it between a pair of them.

Fleming died in London in 1955 of what?

A heart attack struck him at home on 11 March 1955, at 73; the shy laboratory man had spent his last decade touring the world as the public face of penicillin.

Where are Fleming's ashes buried?

St Paul's Cathedral: his ashes lie in the crypt close to the tombs of Nelson and Wellington, which puts a farm-born bacteriologist among the nation's greatest war heroes.

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

A sulphonamide drug, from the class of germ-killers that came before penicillin, pulled him through pneumonia; the tale that Fleming's mould did it is fiction, like the one about Fleming's father rescuing a young Winston.

Announcing his recovery in December 1943, how did Churchill refer to the drug that had actually cured him?

'This admirable M&B' used the maker's initials, and Churchill could not resist adding that the letters might just as well stand for his two doctors, Moran and Bedford.

The Sir Alexander Fleming Building stands on the South Kensington campus of which university?

Imperial College London absorbed his old medical school in 1988, which is why a building the Queen opened on its campus ten years later carries his name.

What drove Fleming and his wife out of their Chelsea home in March 1941?

Bomb damage in an air raid: a land mine wrecked the house during the Blitz, so the couple saw out the war in a friend's home in Highgate, with some nights spent sleeping at the hospital laboratory.

Which London institution, a forerunner of today's University of Westminster, did the teenage Fleming attend after leaving Scotland?

Regent Street Polytechnic: he joined an older brother in London at about fourteen and took its classes for two years, long after the older Royal Polytechnic Institution on the same site had shut its doors.

Fleming spent fourteen years in the London Scottish volunteer regiment at which rank?

Private: he stayed in its ranks for fourteen years, then served through the First World War in the Army Medical Corps, rising to captain, and was mentioned in dispatches.

Which group elected Fleming Rector of Edinburgh University in 1951, over rivals including the Aga Khan?

Its students: eight candidates stood, the novelist Evelyn Waugh among them, and Fleming, carried by the medical students, won with 1,096 votes to the Aga Khan's 660.

What had Fleming just returned from when he spotted the famous mouldy plate?

A holiday: before leaving he had left his used culture plates on the bench, and on his return one of them showed a clear ring where a stray mould had killed the germs.

Fleming's Nobel co-laureate Howard Florey ran which Oxford institution, where penicillin was turned into a usable drug?

Sir William Dunn School of Pathology: Florey took its chair in the mid-1930s and gathered the chemists who, more than a decade after Fleming found his mould, finally purified what it made.

Howard Florey, who led the Oxford team that made penicillin a medicine, came from which country?

Australia: born and trained in Adelaide, he reached Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and two decades later was heading the team that turned a London laboratory curiosity into a drug.

Short of proper equipment, Oxford's penicillin team found which hospital item ideal for growing the mould in bulk?

Porcelain bedpans gave the mould the wide, shallow surface it needed, so the team had a pottery firm turn out hundreds of stackable ceramic vessels modelled on them.

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

Police constable: he began to recover, but supplies were so thin that the team re-extracted the drug from his urine to inject it again, and when even that ran out he relapsed and died.

The mould strain that made mass-produced penicillin possible was found growing on what at a market in Peoria, Illinois?

A cantaloupe: the government laboratory there had soil samples sent in from around the world, yet the winner came from the local fruit market, a mould that made about six times more penicillin than Fleming's own.

Oxford's wartime 'penicillin girls' were hired to do what?

Tend the mould cultures: the penicillin girls earned £2 a week minding rows of culture pots, because no British drug firm could spare the capacity in wartime and a university department had to turn itself into a factory.

Which food is a particularly rich source of lysozyme, the germ-dissolving enzyme Fleming discovered before penicillin?

Egg white: a pike caught on a fishing weekend turned out to have the enzyme packed into its eggs, so the laboratory tried hen's eggs next and found the richest supply of all.

For Scotland's Year of Homecoming in 2009, Fleming's portrait went on a new what?

£5 note: the Clydesdale Bank gave him the fiver that Robert Burns had held on its older notes, moving the poet up to the £10 in the same series.

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

Paddington: his laboratory was a cramped turret room looking down on Praed Street, a short walk from the railway station, and the same room is now a museum of the discovery.