(soft upbeats)
- Everybody has heard the name
Alexander Fleming, he's somebody we all study at school.
What he was fascinated by
was the hidden micro world lies beyond our vision.
He became obsessed with microbes bacteria
and he studied them relentlessly.
During the first world war
Fleming had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
And in France, in the hospitals behind the Western front.
He had seen at first hand the consequences
of bacterial infection, septicemia gangrene.
Of the millions of soldiers who died in world War One
it's estimated that around a third
were not killed by shell fire or machine guns
but by disease.
Fleming understood as well as anybody possibly could
desperate urgent need for new treatments
to combat bacterial infection.
(soft music)
London, 1928, Fleming is working in his lab.
(soft music)
(stamping feet)
The story of Alexander Fleming gives hope
to anyone with an untidy desk
because his untidiness was actually critical
to what happened.
(soft music)
In the summer of 1928
Fleming left a Petri dish contaminated with the bacteria
staphylococcus on his desk uncovered.
(soft music)
He then went off on a vacation
but he left one of the windows of his laboratory wide open.
(stamping feet)
(soft music)
(door slumping)
(soft music)
A microscopic fungal spore is blown in through a window
perhaps escaped from a downstairs laboratory,
(soft music)
pivoting and floating on a sea of turbulent air.
It sinks down onto one of Fleming's uncovered Petri dishes.
(upbeats)
(murmurs)
(train squealing)
On the 3rd of September, 1928, Alexander Fleming
returns to his laboratory and to his untidy desk.
(soft music)
This is the groundbreaking moment
(soft music)
because Fleming starts to look through
all the Petri dishes he left on his desk
(soft music)
and something catches his eye.
(soft music)
On one of the dishes, He sees that the mold has grown
and around the mold
there was no staphylococcus activity.
(soft music)
What Fleming concludes is that the bacteria has been killed
by something produced by the mold.
So this naturally occurring mold, something that's literally
in the air could be a bacteria killer.
(soft music)
This was a discovery of enormous significant (mumbles)
that was eventually to win Alexander Fleming,
the Nobel Prize.
(upbeats)
- And I think a lot of people assume
when they hear the Fleming story
that after Fleming makes this accidental discovery
within a couple of years
penicillin is available as a medicine changing the world.
But in fact, the development of the drug itself
effectively gets paused for a decade
after Fleming's accidental discovery.
- We so much want to believe in that sort of Hollywood story
of accidental discovery, kind of addicted to the narrative.
In Fleming's amazing guy we shouldn't take it away from him.
He understood, he discovered something significant
but he didn't have all the skills needed.
He wasn't a chemist.
He couldn't have taken things much further.
And I think more importantly,
he didn't have the network needed to transform
an accident in a Petri dish,
to the drug that changed the world.
- You need to have networks of people with different skills,
different fields of expertise coming together
to solve a problem.
And in fact, that's exactly what happens
in the history of penicillin.