Letter to the Editors: Alexander Fleming

Dear Felix Science Writers,

In issue #1890, Felix, you nearly got it right, but not quite. Alexander Fleming helped in the discovery of penicillin by noticing and crudely measuring the effect of the fungus which produced the chemical responsible for its crucial antimicrobial activity. Howard Florey, Ernst Chain (the guy the building I work in is named after and who was the HoD of the Department of Biochemistry (now Life Sciences) for many years, many years ago) and Norman Heatley at Oxford did extremely important work isolating and scaling up its production (Florey and Chain being co-Nobel laureates with Fleming). The Pfizer corporation later scaled up production using the then novel process of deep-tank (submerged culture) fermentation in time to equip the allied soldiers for the D-Day landings! Later, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin determined the structure by X-ray crystallography (in 1945) with its total synthesis (my own area of expertise) finally proving the structure beyond doubt chemically by John Sheehan at MIT in 1957.

As you can see, the discovery of penicillin was a veritable relay race involving many individuals and great minds, not one individual.

Best wishes,

Steve Connelly,

Undergraduate Education Co-ordinator

Department of Life Sciences

Dear Steve,

While I agree, and appreciate your noting that, Sir Fleming was only one of many individuals involved in the discovery of penicillin, the same could be said of all the other notable inventions and discoveries discussed in the other biographies. Dyson ‘invented’ the bagless vacuum but didn’t invent the cyclone mechanism - he was inspired by sawmills, which use a similar mechanism at a larger scale. All science is a collaborative process, with the small observations of many building to practical applications by many. Our goal with these biographies was never to comprehensively discuss the minutiae of each discovery, only to broadly outline what each figure was most famous for. In any case, we could have been more exact, saying “first noted” the antimicrobial activity of penicillin.  

Best Regards,

Hanna Irzyk,

Science Editor

Dear Hannah,

Thanks for your response.

The problem with the great man (or, rarely, woman) approach to science etc is that these rapidly devolve into memes, in this case, “Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin” which suggests he did this single-handedly when in actual fact he “co-discovered penicillin” and, without the considerable efforts of many others (including lots of students and researchers barely or not even mentioned), there his observations would lie never to have progressed a single iota further on (like the other antimicrobial agents previously identified but which did not progress to the clinic (re: Russian scientists and their observations)).

Best wishes,
Steve