Sir Alexender Fleming

(1881-1955)

Father of Life-Saver Penicillin

Alexander Fleming was born, the son of a Scottish hill farmer, in Ayr in 1881. As soon as he was able to walk he showed the interest in sport which was to characterize him throughout life and which was to alter the course of that life, and of the world. He and his brothers, though they were unable between them to afford a gun, would go out on hunting expeditions through the heather, stalking rabbits and catching them in their bare hands. They swam, they ran, they played football and climbed trees. They were happy. But from time immemorial, Scots have tended to go south to make their reputations and their fortunes; the Fleming brothers were no exception. By 1895, when Alec was fourteen, there were four of them living in London in an old house in the Marylebone Road, being looked after by their sister Mary. Alec’s first job was as clerk to a shipping firm, work which he found interesting and congenial, and it is probable that he would have remained, and prospered, in commerce all his life, had not a legacy from an uncle given him the chance of taking up his brother Tom’s suggestion of medical school. Alec agreed, even though the “wasted years” as a clerk made him older than his fellow students. He never regretted those years.

After he had succeeded in passing the entrance exam (and he passed top of all United Kingdom candidates, in July, 1901) he was able to choose his medical school. He chose St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington for the very simple reason that he had recently played water polo against him. This apparently fortuitous decision flung him up against the great bacteriologist, Almroth Wright in whose laboratory he now found himself working.

Fleming was able to do a great deal of valuable practical work in bacteriology in Wright’s laboratory before passing his finals in 1908. The had-picked team he worked with were a brilliant, artistic, talkative lot, very different on the surface from the circumspect young Scot, but their influence on him was considerable.

In the terrible butchery of 1914 many wounded men were coming into hospital with their wounds crawling with bacteria, and Fleming soon saw that antiseptics were useless.

In fact, the only antiseptic which could be of positive value, Fleming realized, was one that would help the body’s natural defenses. Various solutions were able to do this for a few minutes, but soon their efficacy vanished.

He had tried various human secretions and now he found that human tears, dropped into a culture of bacteria, dissolved them with startling speed. The substance in the tear drop which had this effect he named “lysozyme” and he soon discovered that it was contained in nail-parings, hair and skin, and even in certain leaves and stalks of plants. Unfortunately, lyzozyme, which was so powerful against some bacteria had very little effect on the dangerous ones. Its immediate use was therefore limited, but it was an important step in bacteriology. Fleming read a paper on it to the august Medical Research Club in December 1921 and got a frigid reception. Eight years later, he was to get exactly the same reception for his first discovery of penicillin.

Between lysozyme in 1921 and penicillin in 1929, Fleming never stopped his research into his own pet theory—that something from the human body, something living, was the answer to bacteria.

But from the day that the “penicillium notatum fungus” blew in through his Paddington laboratory window, though he was utterly convinced of its ultimate value, Fleming and his colleagues worked on the extraction and stabilization of the drug.

By the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, ten years after its initial discovery, penicillin could still not be produced in large quantity or made stable. Then a team under the Australian Howard Florey, go together in Oxford determined to solve the problem. Gradually they found they were able to purify small quantities of the mould by a complicated method of evaporation—“freeze-drying”—and the time came to try this new drug on a patient. An Oxford policeman was dying of septicaemia from a small scratch at the corner of his mouth which had infected his blood stream. On 20 February, 1941, an intravenous injection of the purified penicillin was given to the dying man and thereafter every three hours. At the end of twenty-four hours the improvement was almost incredible, the patient was practically recovered. Then the penicillin which they had labored so long to produce ran out. The patient hung on for a few days but the microbes, no longer being attacked by penicillin, got the upper hand and he died.

The stuff just had to be made faster and in large quantities. To this end help was sought in America and at last the Northern Regional Research Laboratory of Peoria, Illinois, agreed to help. This laboratory had been working on the uses for the organic by-product of maize, was an ideal medium for the growth of fungi. The laboratory staff became enthusiastic and in a short time Peoria was producing twenty times as much as Oxford. At the same time the research team was on the look-out for mould-strains which might give a larger yield of penicillin. So far every gram of the drug that had been made had descended from the spore that had landed on Fleming’s bench in 1929. Many experiments were made with moulds, but it was not until 1943 that the young woman the laboratory employed in Peoria to go round the markets looking for rotten fruit (they called her “Mouldy Mary”) brought back a canteloup melon. The mould from this, a “penicillium chrysogenum”, provided a remarkably productive mould of the penicillin type, and nowadays almost all penicillin in use is descended from that one rotten melon bought in the market at Peoria, Illinois, U.S.A..

At last, the real value of Fleming’s discovery became clear to everyone. Production, both in England and America, mounted by leaps and bounds. At first all of it was earmarked for the Services.

Honors showed down on the shy and sensitive Alexander Fleming. In July 1944, he was knighted—in the basement of buckingham Palace.

He had refused—as had all the “Oxford Team”—to patent penicillin, a move which could have brought him hundreds of thousands of pounds in royalty payments.

The manufacture of penicillin became public property and all firms shared what knowledge they picked up in the process.

At the end of 1945, while on a triumphal visit to France as a guest of the French Government, Fleming was told that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

A few years later tragedy stuck; his wife, Sareen, to whom he had been devoted and who had given him the support so badly needed when the world laughed, died. Fleming was heartbroken. He devoted his entire life, day and night, to his research. In 1953 he married a Greek girl, Amalia Voureka, a brilliant biologist who had received a British Council bursary to work in England and had found herself, from 1946, in Fleming’s laboratory. Their happiness was short-lived. He died in 1955 of an illness (coronary thrombosis) which his drug was powerless to control.

The discovery of penicillin has revolutionized the treatment of disease and the young doctor of today can hardly realize how helpless his predecessors felt against so many deadly infections. Penicillin and the whole group of “antibiotics” it triggered off have enabled surgeons to perform operations no one would have dared consider a few years ago, and the average expectation of life has increased so greatly that the whole structure of society is altering. All because a brilliant research worker “did not confine himself to observing, he took action at once”.

Albert Schweitzer

(1875-19656)

Saint Doctor

There are few who look upon life in its more serious aspects, who have not heard of the life and work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer of Lambarene, in French Equatorial Africa; and of those who have heard of him there can be few who have not felt a twinge of inspiration when they have considered his example.

The story of this great man-musician, philosopher and doctor who rejected a brilliant musical career at its height, to put into practice his philosophy of life, reminds one of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, who turned his back on wealth and pleasure for a life of poverty devoted to helping others. For Albert Schweitzer was no less a saint, though he was not canonized, and in these days, when the complexity of modern life makes saintliness difficult to achieve, this man showed, probably more vividly than any other, that “No way of life makes more sense than the way taught by Jesus”.

Everybody in the little Alsatian village of Gunsbach liked the family who lived in the parsonage, from Pastor Schweitzer down to the youngest child. They were a happy family, understanding and sympathetic, to whom a plea for help never went unanswered, even if it meant that they themselves must be deprived. Into his family there had been born on 14 January, 1875, a boy who was given-the name of Albert. As he grew up, Albert attended, with his brothers and sisters, the village school from among whose pupils, the children of the villagers, they made their friends.

Long before he had taken his doctorate Schweitzer had appreciated that there were many questions about Jesus he needed to have answered, questions which his teachers did not or could not answer, so he set about trying to find the answers himself. These answers he began to set down in a book which he called The Quest of the Historical Jesus. It was a study of the different modern attempts to write a life of Jesus. When it appeared in 1911—it took several years to write-many of his colleagues thought it was a dangerous book, because it might shake people’s family in the Gospels. Schweitzer could not agree with them. “Faith which refuses to face the facts, is no faith at all,” he told them. Nevertheless, the book did give rise to much controversy.

By this time, he had become famous in another field. Widor had asked him to write an essay on J. S. Bach, the great composer for the organ, intending it for the use of church organists in Paris. The essay, in some strange way, developed into a masterly two-volume study of the great musician, a masterpiece which has never been surpassed.

Schweitzer had also become as expert an organist as the great Widor himself, an outstanding exponent of Bach’s music, and in this field, too, he had won an international reputation.

As a theologian Schweitzer had son the respect and admiration of the Strasbourg University authorities. So, when the Principal of St. Thomas’s Theological College resigned, they offered the post to Schweitzer, though he was only twenty-eight.

Untouched by the fame which he had achieved at so early an age in his two main fields of endeavor, he lived a life of happiness which few rarely achieve. No one would have been surprised if he had decided to spend the rest of his life in Strasbourg, travelling in vacations to give recitals on the organ in all the capitals of Europe, looking after his students, helping them with their problems and sharing in their jokes.

When he had been at St. Thomas’s only a year, by chance he came upon a report of the Paris Missionary Society and his eye was caught by an article headed
The Needs of the Congo Mission”. When he had read it through, he remembered the parable of Lazaru and Dives. “We here in Europe,” he told himself, “are rich, because we know how fight disease. We are Dives, but those poor native in Africa are Lazarus, full of sores. We are sinning against them.”

Of a sudden he knew what he must do. He must go to Africa to help the natives, and because they needed doctors, he would become a doctor. So he resigned from St. Thomas’s and became a student at the Strasbourg medical school. He qualified six years later. As soon as he could call himself “doctor” he pressed himself to the Missionary Society and offered his services. The Society, however, though needing medical missionaries desperately, hesitated to take him. His book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, had just been published, and they had doubts about sending out a man whose religious ideas were causing such comment. He persisted in his attempts to persuade them, and at last they gave way.

For the next year he studied in Paris a course in tropical medicine, and spent his spare time collecting money to build, equip and run his own hospital which he proposed setting up at Lambarene, on the Ogowe River, in French Equatorial Africa. He gave concerts to raise funds, approached friends, and received assistance which surprised and encouraged him.

In 1912 he married Helen Bresslau, a friend of long standing, and on Good Friday, 1913, he set out for Africa, accompanied by his wife.

The mission station at Lambarene was built on three small hills above the river, on a narrow strip of cleared land. Twenty yards from the houses the forest rose up in a thick, almost impenetrable barrier, so it seemed. The only building available for use as a hospital until the sectional building which was being sent from Paris, arrived, was a disused chicken house. Nothing daunted, he had it cleaned out and there he set out his medicines and his instruments.

Here every day, before he was up, thirty or forty natives would arrive and with infinite patience squat in silence waiting for him to come. The news of his arrival-that’s to say, the arrival of a doctor-had spread like a forest fire, and sick people came many scores of miles in hopes of receiving the magic of his medicine. To them all his great compassion poured out.

His wife looked after his simple bodily needs and helped him in the dispensary. When darkness fell, and his patients had departed, he would sit down at the piano which had been presented to him by the Paris Bach Society as a parting gift, and into the thick forest and over the river would peal out the majestic sounds of a Bach fugue.

Quickly his fame spread. The natives were most impressed by his anesthetics. “First he kills the sick people, then he cures them, and then he wakes them up.”He was the greatest of all medicine-men, “In nine months, he wrote to his friends, he had treated over two thousand men, women and children, and he had seen almost every tropical disease there was.

Because they were German citizens by birth, despite the fact that he was working for French missionary society, when the First World War broke out, the French authorities in the area placed Schweitzers under house arrest, even refusing to allow them to work in their nearby hospital. They did not complain, but obeyed quietly, and on the second morning Schweitzer sat down and began to write. For the last fourteen years a plan to writ a book about the philosophy of civilization had been forming in his mind. When he would write it he did not know. Certainly since coming to Lambarene he had no time. Now he had time. After a day or two, however, the guard over the house was relaxed. He was allowed to work again in the hospital. For three years the Schweitzers carried on as before, then the stupidity of bureaucracy bore down on them again. They were taken to internment in France. They remained prisoners-or-war until the Armistice.

By this time the first two volumes of his great work ‘The Philosophy of Civilization’ were complete and were about to be published. For the time being, returning to Lambarene did not seem possible to him; but after two years in Europe he knew he must go back. Before he could do so, however, money was needed, and for the next four years he toured Europe giving recitals and lecturing to raise the necessary funds.

In 1925 he had raised enough for his immediate needs, and the Schweitzers set out for Africa. On Sundays he preached to them in simple language the simplicity of his own faith and his philosophy of life.

Lambarene grew, permanent buildings replaced the old shacks and hutments, the work increased. The little settlement in which this great and simple man practiced, a very few other Christians practiced, the way of life which Jesus taught, and the man himself, became famous throughout the world. In 1952 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his services to humanity, and no other recipient has been so entirely and utterly worthy of it.

His wife once asked him how long he intended to carry on with his work. “As long as I can draw breath,” he answered.

“Come home!” Pleaded his friends in Europe. “We need you here.” he returned them a simple answer. “They need me here.” And Albert Schweitzer remained at his task until his death on 4 September, 1965. He was buried at Lambarene.