The curious story of Alexander Fleming and how people discouraged him to use Penicillin

Alexander Fleming was knighted as well as awarded the Nobel Prize between the years 1944 to 45 for his discovery of penicillin in the year 1928. However it was in 1941 that the “British Medical Journal” reported that penicillin does not appear to have been considered as possibly useful from any other point of view. Immediately after this a team of scientists helped formulate a procedure for mass production which by 1944 had enough supplies to treat wounded soldiers during the D-Day invasion of Europe. This article is the story of Alexander Fleming, Penicillin and the way he had to wait for almost 20 years for recognition of his work.

A doctor on a mission

In 1903, Alexander started his professional education and got his MBBS with distinction in 1906. He also got a BSc degree with gold medal in bacteriology. He then took up a job at the same college where he studies till 1914. After that he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as an Army Doctor all throughout the First World War. 

After the war he returned as a lecturer to the same hospital. 

A war zone is a place where hygiene is lacking, health care is more prioritized towards gun shot wounds and soldiers hardly get time to rest. Bacteria thrives in such an environment. This stint of Alexander Fleming in an active war zone must have made a permanent impact on his mind. 

Discovery of penicillin

The discovery of penicillin is exactly how Flemings describes it, “Finding something you are not looking for.”

In Sept 1928, Fleming had proceeded on a holiday with his family after leaving behind cultures of bacteria which he was studying in his lab. The bacteria was Staphylococcus aureus which is found in the respiratory tract and skin. It causes a variety of respiratory infections as well as food poisoning. He accidentally contaminated one of the cultures with fungus and that particular culture destroyed the bacterial culture while keeping the other cultures which were far away, intact. 

Now fungus or moulds have been known since ancient times as bacteria killers. Civilizations in China, Egypt, Australia and India have been using this method to heal infections. The only problem was such kind of treatment was not well documented but was rather passed from generation to generation. Also they could not conduct experiments in labs to isolate the active components. They always used the natural form directly. 

By September end that year, he had re-grown the mould and started testing it against various bacterial cultures. He concluded that there was an active ingredient which was killing the bacteria. The biggest challenge remained creating the mould in large numbers so that sufficient material could be extracted for testing.

Fleming spend the next 10 years publishing his work in various medical journals and making several presentations. All of those met with a lack of response and general disinterest. The final nail in the coffin was the report by British Medical Journal in 1941 which ended with the line, “…and does not appear to have been considered as possibly useful from any other point of view.”

In 1939, a team of scientists from Oxford University who later named themselves as the Oxford Team accidentally stumbled upon his work. They started with his research paper and the sample of mould which was preserved in the lab. They found a way to dry it into a powder leading to its purification. First they tested the powder on animals and they tied up with the US Department of Agriculture for mass production. The team started testing the medicine on human patients in 1941. For two years they kept testing on patients and on 27th March 1943, the Lancet reported successful treatment of 187 cases of sepsis. 

The next task was to take up the challenge of mass production at the govt level. In the year 1942 and 1943 whatever penicillin was produced was used up for treating the patients who were still test subjects. In order for penicillin to make a dent, some production method had to be discovered. The American Corn Industry came to the rescue. 

America traditionally produced the largest crop of corn in the world. A corn kernel consists of corn oil, protein, starch and fiber. Each of this component is separated and used as raw material for various products. This process is called corn wet-milling and there are a lot of processing facilities all across America. One of the by-product of the milling process is the corn steep liquor which was used by an American Micro-Biologist for production of penicillium. Another scientist used the deep-tank fermentation method for producing large quantities in quick time. This is how the War Production Board could produce 64000 crore doses by the end of the year. This enabled enough medicine for the invading forces of Normandy saving an estimated 15% soldiers. 

Did the scientific community ignore discovery of penicillin

Yes, for 10 years no one in the British Scientific and Medical community including the big pharma even bother to check what was discovered. It was the Americans who put effort to mass produce it.

Later he was awarded different medals by United States, France, Greece and Spain. His laboratory where he discovered penicillin is well preserved and now a museum. But in 1936 when Fleming talked about the important of penicillin in the Second International Congress of Microbiology held at London, no one believed him. These ten years however, he was constantly working on methods to produce and extract penicillin single-handed.