If you think about the defining image of modern
medical science, it's usually this picture of
absolute pristine control, right? Oh, absolutely.
Spotless steel counters. Yeah. Perfectly calibrated
instruments. Researchers in these crisp white
coats, executing like flawlessly planned experiments
in sterile rooms. Right. Because we want to believe
that the systems keeping us alive are born from
pure, deliberate intent. Exactly. assumption
that a world -changing breakthrough has to be
the result of a perfectly straight line from
hypothesis to discovery. When you dig into the
historical source material, that pristine image
shatters pretty quickly. It really does, which
is why we're doing this deep dive today. If you
are looking for thorough knowledge and multiple
perspectives without being bogged down by dry
textbook jargon, you are in the right place.
The reality of medical advancement is just it's
often Far more chaotic. Taotic is the perfect
word. And looking at your backdrop right now,
it seems you've already set the stage for us.
I have, yeah. Because we're looking at a wildly
clored 1920s bacteriologist's laboratory. I mean,
there are stacks of Petri dishes, precariously
balanced vintage microscopes shoved aside. Culture
plates just left open. Yeah. Papers scattered
absolutely everywhere. It is a spectacular mess.
It's the exact working environment of the man
we're focusing on today. a researcher whose own
colleague famously noted that his monumental
success was largely due to his excessive untidiness.
Right. Today our mission is to explore how a
string of wildly unpredictable accidents, a shockingly
messy desk, and a lot of completely ignored research
culminated in the discovery of penicillin. Arguably
the greatest victory humanity has ever achieved
over infectious disease. I mean, no question.
But... To really understand this miracle cure,
we can't just start with the famous moment in
1928. No, not at all. You have to look at the
bizarre series of accidents that even led Alexander
Fleming into a laboratory to begin with. Because
he didn't start out with this burning lifelong
ambition to be a scientist. Far from it. He was
a Scottish farmer's son. He actually moved to
London and spent four years working in a shipping
office. Right. He was just a shipping clerk.
And he only goes to medical school at St. Mary's
Hospital because he inherited a bit of money
from an uncle. Yeah. And his older brother, who
was already a physician, essentially nudged him
and said, you know, hey, you should do medicine
too. Which is wild. But even then, his pivot
into bacteriology research. The field that defines
his entire legacy came down to something as trivial
as a hobby. A hobby, exactly. He was a private
in the London Scottish Regiment, and he happened
to be a remarkably good shot. A good marksman.
Right. So naturally, he joined the medical school's
rifle club. I found this detail in the sources
so hard to believe. The captain of that rifle
club realizes Fleming is about to graduate and
leave. He doesn't want to lose him. Exactly.
The captain desperately wants to keep his star
shooter on the team to win an upcoming competition.
It's just, it's so absurd to give Fleming an
excuse to stay at St. Mary's. The captain suggests
he join the hospital's research department. Specifically
to work under Sir Omroth Wright. Yes. A pioneer
in vaccine therapy and immunology. purely to
keep him on the rifle team. It is staggering
to realize that the trajectory of modern medicine,
the very existence of antibiotics hinged on a
local rifle club trying to stack their roster.
It really is. But OK, let's untack this. This
accidental career placement puts Fleming exactly
where he needed to be when World War One erupts
in 1914. Right. He and his colleagues are sent
to a military hospital in Boulogne, France. And
what he sees there completely changes his understanding
of medicine. Because the conditions in the Those
field hospitals were horrific. I mean, soldiers
with deep jagged shrapnel wounds were dying at
alarming rates. But not from the initial trauma.
No, from sepsis, severe bacterial infections.
And the standard medical protocol at the time
was to continuously treat these wounds with chemical
antiseptics. Like carbolic acid, hydrogen peroxide,
things like that. Exactly. And this is where
the source material gets incredibly counterintuitive
because Fleming observes these treatments and
begins to suspect that the very antiseptics are
pouring into the wounds are actually making the
infections worse. They were killing more soldiers
than the infections themselves in some cases.
Right. I really want to break this down because
how can an antibacterial chemical cause a patient
to die from bacteria? What's fascinating here
is that it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding
of battlefield wounds. These chemical antiseptics
worked perfectly well in a glass tube or on a
surface scratch. Sure, out in the open. Right.
But shrapnel creates deep cavernous wounds. The
deadly anaerobic bacteria, the kind that thrive
without oxygen, were buried deep inside the tissue.
So the chemical antiseptics couldn't penetrate
deeply enough to reach them. Exactly. But they
could reach the patient's own white blood cells.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Fleming actually conducted some
brilliant experiments, even blowing his own custom
glassware to simulate deep wounds to prove this
mechanism. He showed that the chemicals were
toxic to human leukocytes. Right, the white blood
cells that make up our immune system's primary
defense. These cells normally perform phagocytosis,
where they engulf and destroy invading bacteria.
OK, so to use an analogy, the standard medical
treatment of the time was basically like carpet
bombing a city to get rid of a few criminals.
That's a great way to look at it. You end up
destroying the local police force, the body's
natural white blood cells, while the criminals,
the deep bacteria, are just hiding safely in
underground bunkers where the surface bombs can't
even reach them. And with the police force dead.
The criminals completely take over. It makes
total sense when you frame it like that. And
this battlefield observation is the crucial turning
point. It permanently shifted Fleming's mindset.
He realized the prevailing philosophy that medicine
should just find stronger poisons to kill bacteria
was deeply flawed. You can't just poison the
body and hope the bacteria die first. Exactly.
He realized you had to work with the body. You
had to find something that was lethal to microbes,
but completely harmless to human tissue. He knew
the body had its own internal police force. He
just didn't know how to harness it. Right, and
you can't exactly engineer a revolutionary biological
defense mechanism from scratch in the 1920s.
No, you basically have to wait to stumble upon
it. Which brings us to 1921 and the legend of
that incredibly chaotic laboratory you have behind
you. Yes, the famous mess. Fleming's colleague,
VD Allison, openly admitted that if Fleming had
been a tidy scientist, he never would have made
his two great discoveries. Because a tidy scientist
throws out experiments the moment they become
contaminated. Precisely. Fleming, however, tended
to leave his cultured plates sitting around for
weeks. And in late 1921, Fleming is suffering
from what the medical texts politely call acute
carissa. He had a heavy cold. Right, he had the
sniffles. And he's working at his desk, leaning
over an agar plate, thickly covered in a yellow
bacteria. And a drop of his own nasal mucus,
his snot falls directly onto the bacterial culture.
And like we said, most people would toss the
ruined plate in the bin. But Fleming leaves it.
He leaves it. And when he examines it later,
he notices something fascinating. The area immediately
surrounding the drop of mucus isn't just slightly
affected. It's completely clear, right? Yes,
a totally transparent ring. The opaque bacterial
colonies have been utterly obliterated. He's
literally melting the bacteria with his own bodily
fluids. And he immediately tests it. He creates
a cloudy yellow suspension of the bacteria in
saline, drops in a tiny amount of fresh mucus,
and within two minutes, the entire test tube
turns completely clear. The bacteria just gone.
Gone. He discovered an enzyme, which he named
lysozyme. It essentially breaks down the chemical
bonds in the bacterial cell wall, causing the
bacteria to burst open and die. And what follows
this initial discovery is, honestly, it's one
of the more surreal experimental phases in the
history of medicine. Oh, you mean the tear milking
operation. The tear milking operation. Fleming
realizes that if this enzyme is in his nasal
mucus, it must be in other bodily fluids. So
for weeks, he and his research team forced themselves
to cry. They try rubbing onions in their eyes,
which doesn't work well enough. So they switch
to squeezing raw lemons into their eyes just
to produce tears to test. I mean, the dedication
is wild. It is. And the demand for tears in the
lab actually outpaced what the researchers could
produce themselves. Didn't they start paying
the staff? They did. They paid laboratory attendance
a bounty of three pence for every contribution
of tears they could provide. That's amazing.
Fleming went on to test egg white, blood, pus,
semen, and found this lysozyme enzyme almost
everywhere. He had discovered the first antimicrobial
protein that constitutes part of our innate human
immunity. It's an incredible breakthrough in
immunology. But, okay, reading through the sources,
I had a hard time understanding the reaction.
A public reaction. A scientific reaction. He
discovers this incredible natural bodily defense.
He presents these findings in December 1921 to
the Medical Research Club, then the next year
to the Royal Society, where he literally dissolves
the bacteria Mycococcus lysodacticus right in
front of their eyes. Yes, live demonstration.
And the response from the scientific community
is absolute crickets. Total silence. Why? Was
he just a terrible public speaker? Was he a bad
salesman for his own science? Well, his presentation
style was famously understated, but that wasn't
the real issue. What's fascinating here is the
clinical limitations of what he had found. OK,
what do you mean? The specific bacteria he was
melting in front of them, microcaucas, lysodehicticus,
is generally harmless to humans. Lysasi was brilliant
at destroying harmless environmental microbes,
but it was largely ineffective against the lethal
disease -causing pathogens that were ravaging
hospitals. Oh, so it didn't solve the immediate
crisis. Exactly. The medical community was desperately
searching for a cure for lethal diseases. So
they viewed his discovery as a fascinating, but
ultimately useless biological curiosity. I see.
So it's a proof of concept. He proves that a
natural human -safe antibacterial agent can exist.
But he needs a much bigger weapon to take out
the real killers. Right. And he wouldn't find
it until 1928, when his legendary untidiness
strikes again. Here's where it gets really interesting.
It's September 3rd, 1928. Fleming returns to
his St. Mary's laboratory after a family holiday
in Suffolk. And before he left, he had inoculated
several culture plates with saff Which is a highly
dangerous bacteria that causes severe infection.
Yeah, very dangerous. But instead of storing
them in an incubator, he just left them stacked
on a bench in the corner of his room. And while
he was away, a stray fungal spore drifts up from
the laboratory directly below his. The room of
an allergy researcher named Charles J. Latouche.
Right, it drifts up and lands on one of Fleming's
open plates. So when Fleming returns and begins
sorting through these haphazard stacks of plates,
he notices the fungal contaminant. It was later
identified as a rare strain called penicillium
rubens. And it's growing right in the middle
of the plate. Yes. But what catches his eye is
the perimeter around the mold. The deadly Staphylococci
colonies closest to the fungus haven't just stopped
growing. They are undergoing lysis. They are
dissolving. Dissolving. Just like the bacteria
exposed to his tears years earlier. And looking
at this profound medical breakthrough, literally
the ultimate weapon against infectious disease,
Fleming famously just mutters, that's funny.
Exactly. It's the understatement of the century.
But his mind was prepared by the lysozyme discovery.
He knew exactly what he was looking at. A biological
agent producing a substance that destroyed bacteria
without harsh chemicals. But how exactly does
the mold do it? The sources mention it attacks
the bacteria, but what's the actual mechanism
that makes it so deadly to pathogens, but perfectly
safe for humans? It's brilliantly specific. Penicillin
targets a key structural component that bacteria
rely on, but human cells simply don't have. Okay,
what is it? Bacteria are encased in a rigid cell
wall made of a mesh -like polymer called peptidoglycan.
Penicillin molecules bind to and disable the
enzymes that the bacteria use to weave this mesh
together. So they can't build their walls properly?
Right. So when the bacteria try to grow and divide,
their cell walls become inherently weak and flawed.
The internal pressure of the bacteria causes
them to literally burst open. Wow. And human
cells? Because human cells have flexible membranes
instead of rigid peptidoglycan walls. The penicillin
simply ignores them. It's the perfect targeted
strike. He grows this mold in a pure culture.
He originally calls it mold juice, which is gross.
Very appetizing. Right. He finds it kills the
pathogens that cause pneumonia, meningitis, diphtheria,
scarlet fever. He officially names it penicillin
in 1929. He writes a paper. He takes it back
to the medical research club. And what happens?
The exact same thing that happened with lysozyme.
Utter indifference. It's maddening. Henry Dale,
who is chairing the meeting, later admitted he
didn't sense any striking point of importance
in Fleming's speech. But the source material
reveals there's a very real physical reason it
didn't catch on immediately. Fleming essentially
stumbled upon the blueprints for a warp drive,
but in 1920 science just didn't possess the metallurgical
tools to build the engine. That's a great analogy
because identifying the mold's antibacterial
properties was biology. but turning that mold
juice into an injectable drug. That requires
chemistry. Exactly. Penicillin is a highly unstable
molecule. If you try to extract it using the
chemical methods of the day, the molecule simply
degraded and vanished. It was too fragile. Think
of it like trying to extract a remarkably intricate,
incredibly fragile origami structure out of a
swamp. using a bulldozer, just end up destroying
the very thing you were trying to save. Fleming
enlisted biochemists, but they all failed to
chemically purify it. They couldn't isolate the
penicillin to produce it in large usable amounts.
Oh, they couldn't. And so it just languishes,
completely forgotten by the wider medical world
throughout the entire 1930s. But if we connect
this to the bigger picture, here is where Fleming
deserves immense credit. Despite being ignored,
despite the repeated chemical failures, he kept
the original mold alive. He just kept feeding
it. He meticulously cultured it, week after week,
year after year. He distributed samples to anyone
who asked. He essentially acted as a caretaker
for this fragile discovery for 12 long years,
just hoping that chemistry would eventually catch
up to his biology. Which sets up an incredible
relay race of scientific discovery, because the
final sprint to the finish line, the actual creation
of the drug, Doesn't happen in Fleming's lab
at St. Mary's. No, it happens at Oxford University
starting in 1940. A brilliant team at Oxford,
led by the pathologist Howard Flory and the biochemist
Ernst Chain, decides to systematically study
natural antibacterial substances. And they dug
up Fleming's 1929 paper on penicillin and requested
a sample of the live mold. And it's a third member
of their team, a biochemist named Norman Heatley,
who finally solves the origami problem. Heatley
was brilliant. The sources say he figured out
how to purify it by changing its acidity. How
does shifting the pH magically stabilize this
incredibly fragile molecule? Keatley's mechanism
was a stroke of genius called back extraction.
Penicillin is a weak acid. Keatley realized that
if he made the mole juice highly acidic, the
penicillin molecules would happily dissolve into
an organic solvent like ether. OK, so that leaves
a lot of the water -based impurities behind in
the swamp. Exactly. But ether evaporates quickly
and isn't exactly something you want to inject
into a patient's veins. No, definitely not. So
he then reversed the process. He introduced the
ether mixture to water that was slightly alkaline.
The pH shift caused the penicillin to abandon
the ether and dissolve back into the water. Leaving
it highly concentrated and vastly purified. Exactly.
It's like coaxing the delicate origami across
a chemical bridge, leaving all the mud behind.
They finally have a stable, purified form. They
start running trials, and the success is staggering.
Which leads to a moment in 1942 that honestly
feels like it was scripted for a movie. The case
of Harry Lambert. Ah, yes. Harry Lambert was
an associate of Fleming's brother. He was admitted
to St. Mary's Hospital with streptococcal meningitis.
Which is a severe, usually fatal infection of
the tissues surrounding the brain and spinal
cord. Very fatal. Fleming initially tried treating
him with sulfa drugs, which were the new standard
chemical treatments of the late 1930s, but Lambert's
condition was deteriorating rapidly. He was slipping
into a coma. Desperate, Fleming tests his original
penicillin mold against Lambert -specific bacteria
in the lab and finds it susceptible. So he immediately
calls Howard Flory at Oxford and practically
begs for their entire supply of the newly isolated
purified drug. Flory sends it over and Fleming
makes an incredibly bold, unprecedented move.
He doesn't just inject it into Lambert's muscle.
No, he injects the purified penicillin directly
into Harry Lambert's spinal canal. The medical
risk there was immense. It was huge. But the
results were miraculous. Lambert showed signs
of improvement the very next day and completely
recovered within a week. Fleming published this
clinical case in The Lancet in 1943, and the
world finally woke up. And suddenly we are in
the middle of World War II, and the British War
Cabinet realizes they need mass production immediately.
But the British infrastructure is being bombed,
right? Right. So American pharmaceutical companies
are brought in to scale up Heatley's extraction
process. And by D -Day in 1944, they had produced
enough penicillin to treat all the wounded allied
troops. It's an unprecedented industrial mobilization.
It truly was. But as the drug saves thousands
of lives, the media gets involved and the story
takes a weird turn. Right. Because when the news
of Harry Lambert's miraculous recovery broke,
the press was hungry for a hero. The Times eagerly
interviewed Fleming. But over at Oxford, Howard
Flory had implemented a strict self -imposed
gag order. He believed scientists shouldn't seek
media coverage, so he flatly prohibited his team
from talking to the press. So the media only
has one guy willing to talk, Alexander Fleming.
And they run with it. They solely glorify him.
They construct this romantic narrative of the
lone genius whose messy desk single -handedly
saved the world. And Fleming himself was deeply
uncomfortable with it. He humbly referred to
it as the Fleming myth. It's a fascinating study
in how history is shaped by narrative convenience.
Sir Henry Harris, a later Oxford professor, summed
up the true collaborative nature of the discovery
perfectly. He said, without Fleming no chain,
without chain no flori, without flori no heat
leave, without heat leave no penicillin. It required
the biologist to find it and the chemist to build
it. I have to ask you though, knowing he didn't
purify it, knowing he couldn't turn it into a
usable drug himself, is it fair that Fleming
gets statues in Madrid? His face is on the five
-pound Scottish banknote. He has an asteroid
named after him. While the Oxford team is often
forgotten. Right. Is that fair? Well, fairness
is rarely how history operates. The public, especially
during a brutal global war, desperately needed
a single, relatable hero. A team of biochemists
meticulously tweaking the pH levels of ether
in a laboratory. just isn't as romantic or accessible
as the story of an everyday doctor noticing a
stray mold on a dirty plate. That's true. It's
a better story. And to Fleming's credit, he never
tried to steal their glory. He constantly praised
Florian Chain in his speeches, and in 1945, the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was rightly
shared jointly between all three of them. Speaking
of the media and myths, we should probably clear
up a massive historical fable that still circulates
today. It's an incredible story, but totally
false. The Winston Churchill Connection. Yes,
the wondrous fable, as Fleming himself called
it. There is a persistent myth that Fleming's
father saved a young Winston Churchill from drowning
in a bog in Scotland. And in gratitude, Churchill's
aristocratic father supposedly paid for Alexander
Fleming's medical education. Right. And the story
then perfectly loops back around, claiming that
when Winston Churchill fell deathly ill with
pneumonia during World War II, it was Fleming's
penicillin that saved his life. It sounds like
an email forward you'd get from a relative. And
none of it is true. None of it. Churchill's life
was saved during World War II when he fell ill
in Tunisia. But the medical records show he was
treated with a completely different medication.
a synthetic sulfa drug called M &B 693. The reality
of Fleming's later years was much more grounded
in the practical and ethical challenges of introducing
a miracle drug to the world. For instance, the
money. Right, the patents. When two American
scientists patented a method for increased penicillin
production in the United States in 1944, Fleming
was furious. He believed medicine shouldn't be
a commodity. He famously stated, I found penicillin
and have given it free for the benefit of humanity.
Why should it become a profit -making monopoly
of manufacturers in another country? He was a
purist in that regard. But while the world was
busy fighting over patents and celebrating the
dawn of the antibiotic age, Fleming was already
looking ahead. Seeing the dark side. Yes. And
his foresight regarding how humanity would misuse
his gift was chillingly accurate. This might
be the most mind -blowing part of the entire
deep dive. In 1945, during his Nobel Prize lecture,
Fleming delivers an explicit prophetic warning.
He had noticed during his early laboratory experiments
that if you expose bacteria to non -lethal quantities
of penicillin, the bacteria don't just survive,
they adapt. They develop resistance. He understood
the evolutionary biology at play. If you don't
destroy the entire bacterial population, the
survivors learn to synthesize enzymes that neutralize
the drug. So he stood on the world stage and
warned that, and I quote, the ignorant man may
easily underdose himself and by exposing his
microbes to non -lethal quantities of the drug
make them resistant. He went as far as saying
that thoughtless people playing with penicillin
would be morally responsible for the deaths of
others who later succumbed to those new invincible
organisms. The absolute irony of it. The man
who discovered the ultimate cure spent the rest
of his life warning us that our own behavioral
flaws, our tendency to stop taking pills when
we feel a little better, could render the greatest
medical victory completely useless. It highlights
an important question. Discovering a medical
intervention is only half the battle, right?
Right. The mechanism of the drug is perfect,
but human behavior is not. Ye saw the impending
crisis of antibiotic resistance decades before
it became the global emergency it is today. So
as we look at the breadth of this incredible
story, Fleming's physical legacy is still very
much with us today. The laboratory where he discovered
penicillin at St. Mary's is a museum in London.
Just a few weeks ago, in March 2025, a massive
mural featuring his portrait was unveiled in
his hometown of Darvel in Scotland. There's even
a new Wetherspoons pub opening this September
in Paddington named the Sir Alexander Fleming.
His name is immortalized because his observation
fundamentally divided human history. There was
the era before antibiotics, where a scratched
knee could kill you. And the era after antibiotics,
which allowed for modern surgery, organ transplants,
and global population growth. So what does this
all mean? It's an unbelievable journey. From
a Scottish farm to a shipping office to a rifle
club. From his own snot -melting harmless bacteria
to a stray mold spore drifting through an open
window onto a famously untidy desk. It serves
as a potent reminder that while scientific progress
requires rigorous methodology, chemistry, and
peer review, it also requires an open mind. A
mind willing to look at a completely ruined experiment
and say, that's funny, instead of throwing it
in the trash. Which leaves us with a completely
new angle to ponder. built right out of today's
sources. We started this deep dive by talking
about pristine environments. In our modern world,
we are entirely obsessed with clean desk policies.
We demand perfectly optimized workflows. Aggressively
sanitized digital environments, inbox zero, we
try to scrub out all the chaos. But if Fleming's
own colleague was right, and his two world -changing
discoveries were entirely dependent on his untidiness,
By relentlessly trying to eliminate the mess
from our lives and workspaces today, are we accidentally
sterilizing our own potential for happy accidents?
It certainly makes you wonder what invisible
breakthroughs we might be wiping away with our
antiseptic wipes. If Alexander Fleming had been
forced to use modern productivity software and
keep a spotless desk, would we even have antibiotics
today? Something to think about. Sometimes the
most important thing you can do is just let things
get a little messy. Keep your eyes open for the
unexpected. You never know what might be growing
in the margins.