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Файл:Взгляд на фармацию. Учебное пособие для студентов фармацевтического факультета
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antibacterial powers of the mould from which penicillin is derived,
was a great triumph. He found that a liquid mould culture, which he
named penicillin, prevented growth of staphylococci.
He died on the 11-th of March 1955 in London, and was buried in
St. Paul’s Cathedral. He is known as the «father of antibiotics». e
two letters «A. F.» on a agstone show where he lies.
Early days
Two boys are walking slowly over the moorland above Locheld
Farm. With them is an old black and white dog, named Jock.
Suddenly Jock becomes very excited and runs round and round
a big bush. e boys quickly approach the bush and jump forward
into it.
ere is the rabbit! Jock is running aer him like mad. e rabbit
is quicker and disappears into a burrow.
«We’ll use the other method next time, Bob», exclaimed the older
boy, Alexander Fleming (known as Alec).
«What other method, Alec?»
«A non-looking method», continued Alec, «I believe that rabbits
don’t see you very well. But when you look directly at them, they get
a sort of ash from your eyes. So, that if you go on steadily as if you
hadn’t seen them, the rabbits may not notice you.»
«You don’t say so!» Bob exclaimed. en he added in a low voice,
«Look here, do you see some large ones feeding about thirty yards
up this hill? Wait, I’ll tie Jock up the other side of this bush.»
e boys walked quickly towards the rabbits, pretending they had
not seen anything. en just as they were passing the animals they
rushed upon them, and Alec had his rabbit fast in his hands.
Locheld was not a rich farm and a rabbit would do a good
dinner, as they were seldom less than nine or ten at each meal, and
not much money in the pocket!
Besides catching rabbits Alec and his brothers shed for trout in
streams near Locheld.
e winters were hard. e moors were covered with snow. Oen
they had to go out and look for sheep buried in the snow. ey
had to work hard to bring in some money. e farm stood eight
211
hundred feet up. ere were mountains to be climbed, streams to be
explored. Alec was fascinated by the birds, the animals, the sh, the
wild owers, the insects. He also learned a great deal about farming.
He loved this work.
«e countryman», he once said in later life, «may have to work
harder for his living than a townsman, but he does not do the same
thing day aer day.»
At school
He began to go to school when he was ve. He was a strong little
boy with blue eyes, fair hair, and a healthy, rosy complexion. His
lessons came easily to him; he had a splendid memory and was very
intelligent. To get to school the boys went down the valley in all
weathers. When it was very cold their mother gave the Fleming boys
two piping-hot potatoes to keep their hands warm during the walk
to school and to eat when they arrived there.
On ne days they went to school barefooted.
Sometimes in summer the teacher took her class down to the river
and let them play. When an inspector came they could see his horse
from a long way o, and they would run quickly to the school house,
climb into the classroom by a back window, and be all ready for
the inspector when he came in to question the children. Everything
would go o well, the mistress looking very serious sitting in front
of her blackboard.
She was the only teacher and taught reading, history, geography
and arithmetic.
the nearest town, which lay four miles from the farm at Locheld.
Alec had to walk early each morning and home again in the evening.
is he did in all weathers. In fact he enjoyed these walks because
they gave him the chance to learn a great deal of interesting things
about nature he would not have learned otherwise.
One day Alec ran round the corner of a wall and full tilt into
another boy coming in the opposite direction. Fleming’s nose
met the other boy’s forehead! He saw stars and his nose poured
blood. For the rest of his life he had a boxer’s nose, but this did
not make him ugly.
212
Aer four years at the Darvel School, Alec went to the Academyat
Kilmarnock. It was an excellent school with frequent examinations.
e brilliant medical student
When he was fourteen Alec le home and went to live in London
with his brother. Alec did not want to leave his happy country life;
he would have liked to make farming his career. But his mother
decided to send him to the Polytechnic School in London. He was
soon working in a class of boys far older than himself.
As the Boer War had then broken out, he decided to join the
London Scottish, the regiment which many young Scots joined
when they went to work in London. Fleming also shot, swam and
played water-polo for the regiment. But he was never seat with the
regiment to South Africa.
When Alec was twenty an old uncle, a farmer, died and le him
some money. So Alec decided to become a doctor. He and his
brother discussed where he should do his medical training.
«ere were twelve medical schools in London, and I did not
know any of them», Fleming tells us. «But I had played water-polo
against St. Mary’s – so to St. Mary’s I went.»
Fleming had to pass an examination before he could be allowed
to entera school of medicine. He took a few lessons and then sat for
the exam. He passed on top, and became one of the most brilliant
students the hospital had ever had. He worked very hard – every
morning he got up at ve o’clock to study while the rest of the
students were still asleep. His handwriting was good, «so as to put
is in a good humour, he is likely to give you a good mark».
St. Mary’s Hospital
Fleming arrived at St. Mary’s Hospital quite by chance, and it was
quite by chance that he came into contact with the man who was to
aect his whole life – Sir Almroth Wright, a famous bacteriologist.
Among Wright’s disciples there was a charming young doctor
called Freeman. He was a good shot and he wanted to build up a
new team. One day he asked:
«Are there any Territorials among the students?» e Territorials
were known for their good shots.
213
Someone answered, «Yes, that little fellow, Alec Fleming.»
«What does he want to do?»
«Surgery.»
«Is Fleming a good shot?»
«Very good.»
Freeman decided to persuade Fleming to join Wright’s inoculation
service, and as soon as Alec had his diploma, Freeman invited him
to come and work for Wright. Fleming agreed and joined Wright’s
th
research team in the laboratory, on 6
August, 1906. He never le
the Laboratory till his death.
«Sport has had a considerable inuence on my own career»,
Fleming said, speaking of his own youth.
Water-polo decided him to enter St. Mary’s Hospital; shooting
decided him to make bacteriology his career.
In the laboratory
Wright’s inoculation service was located in two small rooms at St.
Mary’s Hospital. «e Old Man», as Wright was called, had been
Professor of Pathology.
ere is a story of how Wright’s research absorbed him.
One day, when he arrived at the hospital, a piece of paper fell out
of his pocket. e following words were written, on it: «Daddy,
you have forgotten three times to put gas in my balloons as you
promised. I have put three empty balloons in your pocket. Don’t
forget this time, please».
It was the assistant who put gas in the balloons and tied them to
Wright’s overcoat.
Wright was doing experiments which were inspired by the great
work of the French chemist Louis Pasteur – whom Fleming regarded
as the ideal of what a scientist should be – and of the English surgeon
Joseph Lister. Pasteur had established that many diseases are caused
by invisible microbes, or germs. ese germs attack people through
the mouth or nose, or else by settling in open wounds.
Wright’s idea was that the only way to cure bacterial infection,
therefore, was to discover some means of killing the microbes but
without killing the white corpuscles at the same time – something
214
that would help the white corpuscles in their struggle against the
invading germs. It was this idea of Wright’s which the basis of all
Fleming’s work was. He believed in the great force of the human
body when faced with disease caused by bacteria. He decided to
work on this problem the rest of his life.
Fleming sometimes worked sixteen to twenty hours a day.
He would not leave the laboratory until very late at night.
Gas gangrene
At the very beginning of the war Wright was asked to open a
research laboratory in France. He took with him some of his best
men from St. Mary’s and invited Fleming to assist him in his
important work. Fleming agreed enthusiastically.
eir rst laboratory consisted of two bathrooms through which
rana drain-pipe, so that the whole place stank. Every morning,
on their way to the laboratory, Wright and his assistant had to
go through the wards, where they could see the terrible eects of
explosives and the infection set up in open wounds by earth and
pieces of clothing. e patients got worse and worse until they died
of blood poisoning, especially from gas gangrene. e doctors were
powerless to help them.
Imagine there is Tom, a young soldier, standing near his trench.
Suddenly there is a noise like a crack, a violent explosion and poor
Tom has been hit by a piece of shrapnel, making an awful wound
in his leg. Tom is bleeding very hard. His friend, slightly wounded,
puts a bandage impregnated with a yellow antiseptic on Tom’s leg
and so he closes the wound and stops the bleeding.
Half an hour later Tom’s leg is put into a splint and he is taken by
an ambulance train.
e same evening Fleming (now a captain) is doing a round
of the wards.He examines Tom’s wound. It must be cleaned up.
A doctor removes two pieces of shrapnel and a dirty bit of cloth.
Later Fleming goes to see Tom again; he bends down and snis
at the wound. It smells bad. Gas gangrene is beginning. ere is
nothing to be done… two days aer being wounded. Tom is dead.
Tom was one of the thousands of men whom the doctors had to
215
watch dying. e dirt had been carried deep into their bodies. Was
this the cause of the fatal gangrene?
So Fleming, before they buried poor Tom, carefully cut some
pieces of cloth from dierent parts of the dead soldier’s uniform.
en he looked for germs in these pieces of cloth. Within a few
days he had identied the germs, which had been carried deep into
Tom’s wound.
Once more the question was put, what is to be done?
Wright’s answer was: just leave the natural defenses of the body to
do their work, and help them.
Fleming had found, too, that the battle against infection could
be won partly by the body itself if it were not hindered by violent
antiseptics, so dangerous to the tissues, or if it were not hindered
by bandages that kept air away from the tissues, which were then
unable to do then-work, namely, to ght the germs. Unfortunately
the antiseptics were then the only defense against microbes.
Fleming was in despair. He was working day and night, and his
only wish was to do everything he could to help the unhappy men.
«Surrounded by all those infected wounds», he wrote, «by men
who were suering and dying, whom we could not help, I was
eaten up with the desire to have something which could kill those
microbes…» is was the problem which occupied him for the rest
of his life.
e war ended in November, 1918. In January Fleming was
demobilized and returned to St. Mary’s.
e germ killer
One day Fleming’s assistant brought him a plate on which a
colony of dangerous bacteria were being grown.
«is plate is spoiled», said the assistant. «Some mould accidentally
formed on it and I’ll have to throw it away». Fleming was ready to
agree. en he looked at the plate. He had a wonderful power of
observation. And for over een years he knew what he was looking
for.
en he exclaimed, «at is funny!»
e assistant said politely, «Yes, very interesting.» «e germs all
216
round the mould are gone! Whatever destroyed them must have
come from that blue-green mould!»
It was a lucky accident that caused the mould, which had oated
through the window to land in one of Fleming’s cultures. But it was
no accident that Fleming recognized the importance of what had
happened and immediately set about studying it.
He put some of the mould on other plates and grew more colonies
of it. Now came the most important test of all. Was this new substance
toxic to the tissues of an animal? Would it harm the human body at
the same time as it killed microbes, like the old antiseptics?
Fleming injected a rabbit and a mouse with this substance. It did
them no harm! e doctor named this substance PENICILLIN.
It belongs to the same family of moulds that oen appear on dry
bread, in damp cupboards or on old shoes, or fruit. In a few days
it turns dark green and secretes drops of yellow liquid. is liquid
stops the growth of the most common disease germs.
Fleming was nding out more and more about penicillin.
He found that the mould began to produce penicillin on the h
day, when one drop of penicillin to twenty drops of distilled water
would kill microbes.
On the sixth day the penicillin had doubled its strength.
On the seventh day it was ten times as strong.
On the eighth day it was twenty times as strong!
Aer this it grew weaker and weaker.
He tried the new penicillin in the hospital with good results. But
the penicillin was seldom at its strongest when it was wanted. «If
only I could interest biologists and mould experts in penicillin»,
Fleming thought, «so that someone, somewhere, might come up
with a solution to the problem of production».
He wrote a report on his laboratory experiments and presented
it at a medical meeting. e report was quietly overlooked. «You
know», Fleming said once to a physician «I have a very good new
drug – but no one will listen to me. I can’t get anyone interested in
it, or a chemist who will extract it for me».
«What is the name of it?»
217
«I named it penicillin.»
«I have never heard of it.»
Few people outside Fleming’s laboratory, ever had. e year
passed. For ten years Alexander Fleming kept his love for penicillin
in his heart.
Meanwhile, St. Mary’s had been rebuilt. e School of Medicine
now had a ne swimming-pool. Every year there was a shooting
match between the students and the sta.
One year the members of the sta team, on arriving at the match,
found a student who asked how old they were.
«Why do you want to know»?
«We are going to give you a handicap of one point for each year
over forty,» said the student.
When Fleming was asked he said very seriously: «Ninety.» e
student wrote down, «Handicap, 50».
e Miracle
Fleming could not help thinking that one day his child, penicillin,
would do better than anything found so far. He was still looking for
a chemist.
rd
September, 1939, Great Britain was at war with Germany
On 3
again. Fleming lived in London. One night a bomb exploded nearby
and Fleming suddenly saw doors and windows advancing towards
him. «When I saw the entire window-frame moving towards me,
I decided to get out of bed,» Fleming said later.
e Flemings had to move out of London, but Fleming oen slept
at the hospital. When there was bombing, he liked to go up on the
roof and watch the «reworks».
Meanwhile, at Oxford two great research workers, Florey and
Chain, had found a new method for extracting pure penicillin.
ey tried their new powder on dierent bacteria. Fiy white mice
were givena fatal dose of deadly microbes. Twenty-ve of these mice
were treated with penicillin. Aer sixteen hours all the mice which
had not been treated with penicillin were dead. Of the mice which
had been injected with penicillin, all survived.
Florey said, «It looks like a miracle.»
218
It was the happiest day in Fleming’s life. He rushed o to Oxford
to see «his»penicillin in a pure state.
Penicillin had not yet been used on man. en one day a case
was tried.A policeman was suering from an infected wound. His
whole body was covered with abscesses. ere was only a little pure
penicillin. e dying man was given the rst injection of penicillin.
At the end of twenty-four hours there was a great improvement in
his condition. But Florey and Chain were short of penicillin… and
the policeman died.
Florey was looking for a way to put penicillin into production.
He went o to America with some penicillin mould. e United
States Government oered to give several million dollars for
large-scale production of penicillin. ree years later, twenty-one
American companies were producing enough penicillin to treat
seven million patients.
In 1942 Fleming tried his own rst experiment. A friend of his was
very ill, dying. Aer several injections the man was cured.
e Nobel Prize
e war ended and Fleming went on a triumphal tour of the
United States. e French Government invited him to France. A
little later, in Belgium, he received three honorary doctorates in
two days.
A telegram from Stockholm told him that he had been given the
Nobel Prize for medicine (together with Florey and Chain). He ew
over to Sweden to receive his prize. e prizes were presented by
the King of Sweden in a big hall. Later, 700 people sat down to a
banquet. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Fleming said, «My only merit is
that I did not neglect on observation, and that I pursued the subject
as a bacteriologist.» Fame and success le Fleming quite unmoved.
He remained for the rest of his life the same quiet, natural man.
«Everywhere I go people thank me for saving their lives,» remarked
Fleming. «I don’t know why they do it. I didn’t do anything. Nature
makes penicillin – I just found it.»
219
e end of the story
On October 10
th
in 1957 a very simple monument was unveiled at
the entrance gate of Locheld Farm, a tall block of red granite with
the inscription;
Sir Alexander Fleming
Discoverer of Penicillin
Was Born Here at Locheld
th
August, 1881
On 6
4. FREDERICK BANTING
Frederick Banting (1891-1941), a Canadian scientist, was born in
Canada. He was educated at the University of Toronto, Canada. He
was the rst to isolate the hormone called insulin, and succeeded in
preparing it as a specic medicament for the treatment of diabetes.
In 1923 he received the Nobel Prize.
During World War II he was very active in the ght against
Nazi Germany. «e Empire is ghting Hitlerism», he said, «and
Hitlerism is my enemy too». He worked at designing a ying suit
that would prevent «black out» among pilots during their ights at
great heights because of the low pressure of air.
He wanted to help suering humanity in every way he could – and
he did so to the very tragic end of his life. On his way to England he
was killed in an airplane crash in Newfoundland.
Frederick Banting was born on a farm. In his childhood the
family was short of money. Fred had an elder sister, called Esther.
When she grew out of her shoes, Fred had to wear them. Fred was
ashamed to wear a girl’s shoes with high heels. While walking in
the streets, he always hid behind his mother, trying to hide his feet
from passers-by.
Going to school on a hot summer day, he usually took his shoes
o and hid them on the roadside. Sometimes, too, he asked himself,
«What will I do when winter comes? - What will my school friends
think of a boy wearing girl’s shoes?»
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