Fleming paid lab staff threepence per tear, years before penicillin
In 1921 Alexander Fleming noticed that a drop of his own runny-nose mucus dissolved bacteria on a culture plate. To test other fluids, his team spent weeks squeezing lemons into their eyes, onions having failed, and laboratory attendants earned threepence for each tearful donation. The substance was lysozyme, and almost nobody cared.
Fleming arrived on 6 August 1881 on an Ayrshire farm called Lochfield, close to Darvel, one of the children of Hugh Fleming's second marriage; his father was 59 when he remarried and died when Alexander was seven. After four years as a shipping clerk, an inheritance from an uncle and a nudge from his doctor brother sent him to St Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. Oddly, a rifle club kept him there: its captain, keen to hold on to a good shot, steered him into the research department under the vaccine pioneer Almroth Wright.
During World War I he worked at a military hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer and saw that antiseptics often did more harm than good in deep wounds, reaching surface germs while missing those sheltered further in. Using his own glassblowing skills he built an experiment to show it, published in The Lancet in 1917. Most army doctors carried on regardless.
His lysozyme work, presented in 1921 and 1922, met silence; at one meeting nobody asked a single question. The enzyme only attacked harmless microbes in small numbers, so it seemed useless, although late in the twentieth century it was recognised as the first antimicrobial protein found in our innate immune system. A former assistant credited Fleming's untidiness for both his big finds, and on 3 September 1928, back from a family holiday in Suffolk, he found a mould colony had wiped out the staphylococci around it on a forgotten plate. The spores had probably drifted up from a mycologist's room on the floor below.
He called the active ingredient mould juice for months before naming it penicillin on 7 March 1929. It worked against the germs behind scarlet fever, pneumonia and diphtheria, though not against typhoid, the target he was actually chasing. Fleming was knighted in 1944 and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who turned the substance into a usable medicine. He died on 11 March 1955.
Source: Alexander Fleming
