Alexander Fleming Essay

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Alexander Fleming Sir Alexander Fleming was born on August 6th 1881. He was born at Lochfield, a farm near Darvel in east Ayshire, Scotland. He was born the seventh of eight children. Alexander’s father died when he was only seven years old which left his oldest brother to be the man of the house. His brother raised the family and farm with their mother. He attended the Louden Moor School, the Darvel School and Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London. In London, Fleming finished his basic education at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster). Fleming won a scholarship to St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. He went on and passed exams and completed his medical training at the Royal College of Surgeons in England. While at St. Mary's, he won the 1908 gold medal as the top medical student. Alexander Fleming had planned to become a surgeon, but a temporary position in the Inoculation Department at St. Mary's Hospital changed his path toward the then-new field of bacteriology. Over the next few years he worked in a laboratory of the Royal Army Medical Corps as a doctor in World War I. He worked as a bacteriologist, studying wound infections in a makeshift lab that had been set up by Wright in Boulogne, France. Fleming discovered that antiseptics commonly used at the time were doing more harm than good, as their diminishing effects on the body's immunity agents largely outweighed their ability to break down harmful bacteria therefore, more soldiers were dying from antiseptic treatment than from the infections they were trying to destroy . He saved many lives with his discoveries. while nursing a cold, Fleming discovered lysozyme, a mildly antiseptic enzyme present in body fluids, when a drop of mucus dripped from his nose onto a culture of bacteria. This marked Fleming's first great discovery, as well as a significant contribution to human immune system research. Fleming returned to his laboratory after a month away with his family, and noticed that a culture of Staphylococcus aureus he had left out had become contaminated with a mold (later identified as Penicillium notatum). "One sometimes finds what one is not looking for." He also
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