1. Mr. Mohamed Salah OmarGrade 9Abdelrahman Ahmed
Little Alexander, brought up on a farm, walked four miles to school every
day. It was a hard life. An unexpected legacy enabled him to study medicine.
Hard work and curiosity led him to an important discovery. What was it?
●Growing up in the countryside:
Alexander Fleming was born in 1881 at Lochfield Farm in Ayrshire, Scotland.
His parents were farmers. They had a large family of eight children.
Alexander, whom everyone called Alec, was the seventh of these children.
Lochfield Farm was located in a remote part of Ayrshire. Except for a few
scattered farms, there was nothing but the countryside for miles around. The
nearest house was at least a mile away!
Life on the farm was hard- quite hard, but it was never dull. There were the
farm animals to keep the Fleming children busy. And then, there was the
rich surrounding countryside to explore.
The countryside was so rich and teeming with life that there were always
new and interesting things to see and do. Little Alec and his brothers and
sisters loved to spend long hours fishing, or exploring rabbit burrows and
bird's nests.
The Ayrshire winters were bitterly cold with sweeping winds and heavy
snow. Alec and the other children often had to go searching for sheep that
had been buried under the snow. They learnt to spot the yellowish patch
made on the snow by the sheep's breathing.
When he was old enough, Alec helped in sheep-rearing activities on the
farm. This was hard work, but also great fun.
When Alec was five years old, he started going to the neighborhood school.
This school had only about 15 students and one teacher. Everything was
quite informal. Classes were hardly ever held in the classroom. Usually, the
teacher would take the children down to the river, and they would have
their lessons there.

2. Mr. Mohamed Salah OmarGrade 9Abdelrahman Ahmed
When Alec was ten, he moved to a bigger school at the nearby town of
Danvel. This meant that he had to walk as much as four miles to get to
school every morning. Walking eight miles every day was, naturally, quite
tiring. When he was twelve, he moved to another school, which was even
further away.
Alec received only a very sketchy and elementary education at these various
schools. But more important than what he leant at school was what he leant
by being so close to nature.
●Alec goes to London:
When Alec was thirteen years old, he came to London to stay with one of his
older brothers. London was very different from that lovely Ayrshire
countryside.
While in London, Alec studied commerce for two years. Then, because his
family could not afford to educate him any further, he had to stop studying
and started looking for a job.
When he was just a little over sixteen years old, he got a job as a clerk in a
shipping company. The pay was not much and it was really quite a boring
job.
But four years later, his life suddenly took a very different turn. One of his
uncles died and left him 120 pounds in his will. With this unexpected legacy,
Fleming could finally afford to study further. Delighted, Fleming decided to
become a doctor and study medicine.
●Alexander Fleming the bacteriologist:
Soon, young Alec had become Dr Alexander Fleming. He joined a small team
of dedicated bacteriologists at St. Mary's hospital in London. His years in the
countryside had given him sharp powers of observation, and a capacity for
patient hard work. This helped him to become a good bacteriologist.
Fleming was an unusually silent man. But though he hardly ever spoke, his
calm, good nature and quiet, unassuming ways endeared him to others.
A few years after joining St. Mary's hospital, Fleming met and married a
young Irish woman named Sarah Marion McElmay. They were very happy

3. Mr. Mohamed Salah OmarGrade 9Abdelrahman Ahmed
together and they soon had a son, Robert, who later grew up to become a
doctor.
●A terrible war:
In 1914, the First World War broke out all over Europe. This was a truly
bloody and terrible war in which several soldiers died painful and cruel
deaths. Many of them died because their wounds had become septic and
infectious with disease causing bacteria.
Fleming joined the army as a doctor, and at a research laboratory in France,
he tried to find ways which the soldiers' wound could be protected from
infection. In those days, doctors protected wounds from infection by treating
them with chemical antiseptics.
But Fleming discovered that antiseptics were not much use in treating war
wounds. He also found, to his dismay, that antiseptics were actually harmful,
since they killed the patient's white blood cells more than the bacteria that
infected the wounds. Unfortunately, he was unable to find a good way to
treat infected wounds. And so, he was forced to watch the wounded soldiers
die in large numbers.
●Lysozyme:
When the war ended, Fleming returned to St. Mary's hospital and continued
with his research. In his laboratory, he would carefully grow colonies of in
bacteria covered glass dishes. Such colonies are called cultures. He would
then treat these cultures with many different types of substances, in order to
find something that would kill bacteria.
One day, in 1921, Fleming was at work on his culture as usual. He had a bad
cold that day, and his nose was running. He took some mucus from his
running nose and applied it to the culture. Later, he examined the culture
again. What he saw made him stare in amazement. The mucus was
dissolving a colony of bacteria.
He soon discovered that mucus contained a particular protein that destroys
bacteria. He named this protein "Lysozyme". He found that lysozyme is also
present in blood, in tears, in mother's milk and in other parts of the body as
well. He also found that several plant and animal substances like turnip

4. Mr. Mohamed Salah OmarGrade 9Abdelrahman Ahmed
juice, egg white, and the slime that earthworms secrete, also contains
lysozyme. Unfortunately, Fleming's attempts to use lysozyme to fight
bacterial diseases were not successful.
●An accidental discovery:
One September morning, in 1928, Fleming felt cheerful and refreshed after
a short holiday, and eagerly looked forward to getting down to his work
again. He had earlier prepared some cultures of the staphylococcus bacteria
in his glass dishes. One of these dishes had been left carelessly uncovered for
some time. As a result, it had got contaminated and was now covered with a
bluish mould. That mould was very similar to what you see growing on food.
Fleming realized that some spores of mould must have been blown in
through the open window, settled in the culture and begun to grow there. He
was just about to throw away the culture, when suddenly he stopped and
stared very hard at it. Then he took the dish across the window, and in the
morning sunlight examined it very carefully.
Just as he had been about to throw away the culture, he had realized that it
looked rather like a culture that had been treated with lysozyme. Around
every speck of mould. The deadly staphylococcus bacteria had completely
vanished. There was something in the mould that destroyed bacteria.
●From delight to disappointment:
Fleming found that the spores of the fungus secreted a substance that killed
bacteria. He named this substance 'Penicillin'. To his amazement and
delight, he found that penicillin very effectively destroyed a wide range of
deadly disease-causing bacteria. And what was more, unlike antiseptic, it
seemed quite harmless to the body's own cells.
Fleming was overjoyed. He realized that his accidental discovery could
change the face of modern medicine, by providing doctors with an
amazingly powerful weapon against harmful bacteria. He could not wait to
use penicillin as a medicine to treat people.
But he was bitterly disappointed. In order to be used as a medicine, a pure
and stable concentrate of penicillin had to be extracted from the mould.
Though he tried hard, Fleming was just unable to extract penicillin properly.

5. Mr. Mohamed Salah OmarGrade 9Abdelrahman Ahmed
He felt terribly disappointed. After coming so close to success, he had
reached a dead end.
Fleming felt very helpless and frustrated as he watched people dying of
diseases that he knew penicillin had the power to cure. He felt especially
bad when his own brother, John, died of pneumonia. Fleming knew that
penicillin could destroy the bacteria that caused pneumonia, but without a
proper extract, he was powerless to save his brother.
●Florey and Chain to the rescue:
Years passed, and Fleming slowly lost hope that penicillin would be
extracted properly.
Two scientists at Oxford University had read an article that Fleming had
written on penicillin, and realized the importance of the discovery. These
two scientists were Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
Florey was an Australian pathologist. Chain was a brilliant young German
biochemist. Chain was a Jew. When Hitler had come to power in Germany,
and he had determined to kill all the Jews. Chain had escaped to England.
After much hard work, Florey and Chain were finally able to produce an
extract of penicillin that could be used as a medicine.
One day, while Fleming was reading a medical journal called The Larcat, he
got a wonderful surprise. For, in The Larcat was an article by Florey and
Chain announcing the successful extraction of penicillin. Fleming rushed
down to Oxford as soon as he could. Florey and Chain were as delighted to
meet him as he was to meet them. After a long discussion with his two new
friends, Fleming returned to London, a very happy man. His precious
discovery could not have been in better hands.
The drug companies soon began to manufacture penicillin on a large scale.
Meanwhile, the Second World War had broken out. Penicillin was
successfully used during this war to cure thousands of soldiers who would
otherwise have died of bacterial infections.
Fleming's happiness knew no bounds. During the First World War, he had
sadly watched so many soldiers die due to lack of proper treatment. Now

6. Mr. Mohamed Salah OmarGrade 9Abdelrahman Ahmed
during the Second World War, he had the satisfaction of knowing that
thousands of lives were being saved by a drug that he had discovered.
●Fleming's last years:
Penicillin was very soon hailed as a 'Wonder Drug'. Quiet, unassuming
Fleming now became a very famous man and he was constantly in the
limelight. Newspapers wrote about him and functions were organized in his
honor. He was invited to give lectures all over the world.
In 1944, he was knighted, and he became Sir Alexander Fleming. The next
year, along with Florey and Chain, he was awarded the Noble Prize for
medicine.
In 1949, Fleming's happy, busy life, suffered a tragic blow. His wife, Sarah,
died after a long illness. In the years that followed, though he continued his
busy life, he felt very sad and lonely.
Among the scientists who worked with Fleming was a Greek bacteriologist
called Amalia Coutsouris-Voureka, whom Fleming respected and admired
very much. In the long and lonely years that followed Sarah's death, Fleming
grew very close to Amalia and they got married.
They were very happy together for two years, but then, one day in 1955,
while spending a quiet evening at home, Fleming died of a sudden heart
attack. It was a sad end to a long and eventful life. From little Alec Fleming,
the farmer's son, to Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin, he
had come a long way. His death was deeply mourned all over the world.
●Fleming- Nature and modern medicine:
Whenever people congratulated him for inventing penicillin, Fleming would
say 'I don't invent penicillin. Nature invented penicillin thousands of years
ago. I only discovered it!'
Modern medicine has often shown little respect for nature or bothered to
learn from it. The discovery of penicillin only goes to show what a big
mistake this has been. It also shows that modern medicine has much to learn
from people who live close to nature and have learnt to understand many of
its secrets. For, though it was unknown to modern medicine, the healing

7. Mr. Mohamed Salah OmarGrade 9Abdelrahman Ahmed
properties of mould had long been known to peasant and tribal societies all
over the world.
But, unfortunately, medicine had always scornfully dismissed these
traditional practices as stupid and ignorant.
This was a pity. If only scientists had tried to learn from traditional
medicine, penicillin would have been discovered much earlier! Perhaps
something even better would have been discovered.
Today, scientists all over the world have begun to realize that they must
respect nature, and respect traditional systems of medicines that are based
on an understanding of nature.