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    Alexander Fleming Founder of Penicillin

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    Gagauz Silivia
    Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 while observing bacterial cultures in his laboratory. He noticed a mold called Penicillium growing on one of the culture plates that was inhibiting the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria. This mold was producing a substance that was killing the bacteria, which Fleming identified as the first antibiotic, penicillin. It took many years after Fleming's discovery to develop methods to mass produce penicillin, but it became widely available in 1945 and revolutionized medicine by allowing formerly fatal infections to be treated. Fleming is considered the founder of antibiotics, though bacteria are increasingly developing resistance as predicted by Fleming himself.

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    Alexander Fleming Founder of Penicillin

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    Gagauz Silivia
    35 views5 pages
    Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 while observing bacterial cultures in his laboratory. He noticed a mold called Penicillium growing on one of the culture plates that was inhibiting the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria. This mold was producing a substance that was killing the bacteria, which Fleming identified as the first antibiotic, penicillin. It took many years after Fleming's discovery to develop methods to mass produce penicillin, but it became widely available in 1945 and revolutionized medicine by allowing formerly fatal infections to be treated. Fleming is considered the founder of antibiotics, though bacteria are increasingly developing resistance as predicted by Fleming himself.

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    Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 while observing bacterial cultures in his laboratory. He noticed a mold called Penicillium growing on one of the culture plates that was inhibiting the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria. This mold was producing a substance that was killing the bacteria, which Fleming identified as the first antibiotic, penicillin. It took many years after Fleming's discovery to develop methods to mass produce penicillin, but it became widely available in 1945 and revolutionized medicine by allowing formerly fatal infections to be treated. Fleming is considered the founder of antibiotics, though bacteria are increasingly developing resistance as predicted by Fleming himself.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    35 views5 pages

    Alexander Fleming Founder of Penicillin

    Uploaded by

    Gagauz Silivia
    Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 while observing bacterial cultures in his laboratory. He noticed a mold called Penicillium growing on one of the culture plates that was inhibiting the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria. This mold was producing a substance that was killing the bacteria, which Fleming identified as the first antibiotic, penicillin. It took many years after Fleming's discovery to develop methods to mass produce penicillin, but it became widely available in 1945 and revolutionized medicine by allowing formerly fatal infections to be treated. Fleming is considered the founder of antibiotics, though bacteria are increasingly developing resistance as predicted by Fleming himself.

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    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    of 5

    Alexander Fleming

    founder of Penicillin
    ABSTRACT
    • In 1928, Sir Alexander Fleming observed the bacterial-killing effects of
    penicillin in his laboratory in London. This was the first step in the discovery
    of one of the most important pillars of today’s medicine: the antibiotics. It
    took many years to find a way to produce penicillin in large amounts, and
    large-scale production did not start until 1945. However, to this day, Fleming
    is considered the father of the antibiotics, and without his discovery we could
    not treat many infections caused by bacteria. This means that, without
    antibiotics, even a small infected wound could become fatal. In addition,
    surgery is much safer with antibiotics, and people with weak immune systems
    (like children or elderly) can now easily recover from bacterial infections.
    However, bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics, which was also
    predicted by Fleming in 1945, during his acceptance speech for the Nobel
    Prize.
    • AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN…
    • On the morning of Monday, September 1928, Fleming was coming back from a family holiday . Before he
    went on holiday, Fleming was working with a very common pathogen: Staphylococcus aureus. Fleming left
    some glass Petri dishes on his lab bench, with these bacteria growing on the surface of solid medium. Usually,
    these plates would be sterilized by a laboratory technician to reuse them in other experiments. However,
    Fleming always had a final look at all his experiments before discarding them, even if they were kept for
    weeks on the bench (Figure 1A). He would randomly pull samples from the stack of plates to see if anything
    interesting happened during the last few weeks. Because his laboratory was quite primitive, Fleming would
    commonly have contaminations on his plates, which were often caused by yeasts and molds from the
    environment. But one plate looked very different, and when he noticed that plate, he famously said “That is
    funny….” The plate had been inoculated with a dense culture of bacteria, but it was also contaminated with a
    microscopic fungus that created a big colony on the side of the plate. What was unusual was that the bacteria
    were not able to grow in the area close to the fungus colony. There was a perfectly visible area surrounding
    the fungus that was completely free of bacteria; today, we call this a zone of inhibitionArea surrounding the
    source of an antibiotic in which bacterial colonies do not grow. (Figure 1B). Therefore, Fleming discovered
    that a fungus (Penicillium notatum) was producing something that killed Staphylococcus aureus, a dangerous
    pathogen. Fleming had just discovered an antibiotic, and at first, he called this “mold juice”
    CONCLUSION
    • The discovery of penicillin was only possible in a laboratory where
    contaminations were common. Chance certainly played a role in the
    discovery of the first antibiotic, but the training and laboratory practice of
    Fleming were essential for him to identify one of the most important drugs in
    human history. Unfortunately, due to antibiotic resistance, microbiologists
    are in a race with bacterial pathogens to find new ways to treat infections.
    Today, we have a better understanding of how pathogens interact with their
    hosts, how antimicrobials work, and what the mechanisms of antibiotic
    resistance are. But, even 90 years after the discovery of penicillin, there is
    still much more work needed to combat the current antibiotic crisis. You can
    be part of this by participating in the Swab and Send initiative!

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