Alexander Fleming, born in 1881, studied at Darvel Village School and Kilmarnock Academy until he was 13 (Hare 1983). After this, he went on to work as a shipping clerk for four years. At the mere age of 17, Fleming decided to pursue a career in medicine due to the support of his older brother, a physician, Tom. He entered St. Mary’s Medical School, in hopes to learn more about the Natural Sciences. While in college, he became the assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, who was a leading scientist in vaccine therapy and immunology. This is where Fleming gained much of his interest in bacteria and disease. He became a lecturer at St. Mary’s, served in the Army Medical Corps, and became Professor of Bacteriology of University of London …show more content…
Being in the Army Medical Corps piqued his interest in the study of vaccine therapy, or the treatment of bacterial infections (Wanjie 2014). In Flemings’ journal article, “The Discovery of Penicillin,” he writes about what led him to discover penicillin. Fleming returned from a vacation to a disorderly lab, and noticed that there was a layer of mold surrounding the edge of a petri dish and there were many separate colonies of staphylococci, a type of bacteria (Ligon 2005). Where the mold was present, no bacteria were present. Fleming named the mold, Penicillin, after the plant, Penicilium, which he believed it originated from (Fleming 1929). For further testing, Fleming grew the mold on a fluid medium (Ligon 2005). He determined that the microbes in the culture that were inhibited by penicillin were some of the most common infections (Ligon 2005). Fleming discovered a few key things about why penicillin would make such a great antibiotic. It inhibits microbe growth as well as killing microbes, and is easily diffusible, which he believed was an important factor for a bacterial resistance mechanism (Alharbi et al. 2014). He also discovered that at