Alexander Fleming’s Discovery of Penicillin

0:00Welcome to the OK Let's Learn Podcast. This is a family-friendly podcast where we dive into tons of different topics, science, history, book, stories. You name it, we will cover it, we learn something new every day. My name is Kevin O'Keeve, so today OK let's learn all about penicillin, the anti-biotic, the discovery of penicillin, and yes his name is Alexander Fleming and got to know about him. So we'll dive into everything, what an anti-biotic is, what we did in the past, when we got sick and how it is today that we're able to get better so often when we do get sick. We'll talk about viruses, we'll talk about bacteria and their infections every way we get sick, we can all go back to Alexander Fleming and

1:02thank him. So OK let's learn. It was Monday September 3rd, 1928, yes almost to the day that this podcast is originally being sent out. His name was Alexander Fleming and he had just got back from a summer vacation. He went to his laboratory in St. Mary's Hospital in London. He was 47 years old at the time. He was a Scottish by birth and he was a doctor and specifically he was a bacteriologist who is a scientist that studies bacteria. His laboratory was not kind of like perfectly impeccably clean. Again we have to remember that hospitals back in the past there wasn't a focus on everything being perfectly clean, right? This was part and we can actually thank Mr. Fleming for not having a perfectly clean

2:05laboratory, right? It's so ironic because listen to what happened. Like I said, it wasn't that clean, it wasn't sparkling, it wasn't even really organized. How can I say this in a nice way? Let's just say he was definitely untidy. You know how people work, right? And they got papers either in a nice clean pile, everything's organized, you got a clean workspace and others, there's papers all over the place. Well apparently this was Alexander Fleming. He had petri dishes, bottles, papers, cultures and equipment in his laboratory all over his workplace and sitting around in that clutter were some petri dishes. Petri dishes from my younger members of the audience are like these little plastic see-through dishes that have a lid on it and scientists use them to study and grow cells and

3:10bacteria and even molds and you fill the bottom of the dish with this kind of like gel that creates this perfect environment that you can have these little microorganisms grow. And so this is what is laying there, a bunch of them, on his laboratory countertop. Well one of them had this bacteria called Staphlokakis. It's better known by its short name, Staph. But why was Fleming growing Staph bacteria in the first place? Well he was trying to solve a problem that had been bothering him for years. How could doctors kill dangerous bacteria without also hurting or damaging humans? Fleming had survived World War Two and he had seen soldiers suffering from wounds that really should have been able to be healed but they ended up passing away because those wounds got infected. Doctors had

4:14antiseptic chemicals that they could pour onto the wounds but Fleming had become concerned that some of those chemicals could also damage the body's own infection fighting cells. Right? It makes sense. You're going to put something into our body and we're going to actually hurt the ability of our own cells or own white blood cells to kill those infections naturally. Well this presented doctors with a horrible problem. You wanted something powerful enough to kill the bacteria in your body but general enough not to kill your healthy cells along with them. So Fleming spent years studying bacteria and substances that might stop them. This is why Staph cultures were sitting in his laboratory on that day in 1928. Staph was an important bacteria to study because it could cause boils, abscesses, wounds that got infected and really other serious problems.

5:22Then he went on vacation. He went with his family to his country home in Suffolk, England. His house, it was actually called the Dune. It was a great time, right? Typical vacation, plenty of rest and relaxation and he actually talked about it later that he spent a lot of time fishing. Well meanwhile 70 miles away in his laboratory in London, the bacteria were sitting there in a laboratory and sometime during this period an uninvited visitor arrived. Kind of came through, we don't know how, but it got there. It was so small Fleming couldn't possibly have noticed it right? Coming in to the lab. It was a single mold spore. Of course he couldn't see it. Mold or a lot of the mold or mold in this case is small enough and now what a spore is is basically like the mold seed right and obviously with the seeds you're able to make another patch of mold.

6:31Yeah, when a spore lands on some type of wet living surface it breaks open and grows into a new patch of fuzzy mold and we'll get into mold in what it is but just know right now there was a little spore that ended up landing here in his Petri dish. And yes you may be thinking this right up front because he was notoriously messy. Yeah, I'm sorry I'm going to say it. He mistakenly left a few of the Petri dishes uncovered. It was just sitting there right? It's like kind of leaving brie. Again, if mold is not something that you've experienced alive especially again from my younger members of the audience you leave a piece of bread out and you go on vacation for two weeks. Do you know that white fuzzy stuff that's on your bread? That's mold. Now this needs to be said. It wasn't that dirty in his laboratory. No, his laboratory was clean but the bottom line

7:37mold got into his lab. We don't know how it actually got there. Mold was actually being studied elsewhere in the building. So you know air can kind of flow it everywhere through the building ducts whatever it may be. Somehow it landed one of those spores in his Petri dish and it began to grow. When Fleming returned on September 3rd he started sorting through his Petri dishes. Most looked exactly as you would expect. Little colonies, staff, bacteria were grown all over them in those Petri dishes. Then Fleming came to that one dish. Something had gone wrong. There was mold growing in for a scientist. Is trying to grow bacteria? That's not good. That's contamination. The experiment had been invaded by something that wasn't supposed to be there. It would have been

8:38completely normal, completely routine to throw the dish away. But Fleming didn't do that. He just looked and he looked again. It was something strange to be noticed. The staff bacteria was growing throughout the dish but not next to the mold. A medally surrounding that fuzzy patch of mold was an area that was completely clear. The bacteria was gone. Something common from that mold appeared to be killing the bacteria or at least preventing the bacteria from growing. Fleming noticed it. He looked at it and he just simply sat there and said, hmm he had stumbled onto something unbelievable. But let's stop here for a second. We have to understand what mold is. Going back to my episode on mushrooms, you know part of the story about mold, right?

9:43Mold and mushrooms belong to this enormous kingdom of living things, fungi. Mushroom, as we learn, it's just part of the fungus that's growing under the ground that we just happen to see. It grows above the ground and it releases spores like a plant releases seeds so that another fungus could grow. Under the ground, mold similar. It grows as networks of extremely tiny threads and it can grow pretty much anywhere when the mold produces spores, again like its seeds. They can travel through the air and yeah, they can land pretty much anywhere when there's a right temperature, right moisture and right food source. And here's the really interesting part about mold. For thousands of years, they have helped wounds. There are historical accounts, ancient Egyptian medical traditions where moldy bread was placed on cuts

10:49and wounds. People's obviously didn't understand bacteria back then, antibiotics or penicillin the way we do today. But through experience, people realized that yeah, there was natural treatments and interesting, right? That yes, they noticed that mold could help. Now again, just to be clear here, what they couldn't do was take the useful substance that was produced by a particular piece of mold, separate it, purify it, measure the correct dose and put it safely inside the human body. That's what we did. Yes, and that was the problem that Fleming's discovery would eventually help solve because that's what needed to be done. Because after Fleming noticed his unbelievable observation, nothing was done for 10 years. Really, think about the difficulty of what needed to be done. But just before we tackle this now, just so you know, how do you come

11:55up with the name? Well, the mold was identified as pencellium notatum. So since he noticed that this particular mold, pencellium, released the bacteria fighting substance into the liquid around it, he needed the name for the substance, the juice that the mold produced. So he called it penicillin from penicillium. So why did it take so long? Well, it was hard to work with. This was a challenge in front of them. The mold produced penicillin in a liquid broth, but scientists needed to get the active penicillin out of that liquid, separated from everything else, purify it and somehow keep it stable. Well, guess what? It lost its effectiveness during that entire process. The metaphor, it's kind of like making orange juice and then being told that the

12:57one ingredient you desperately need out of the orange juice is present only in a tidy amount and it's going to disappear while you're trying to separate from everything else. So scientists knew that they were able to get it. It's just how to get it and then obviously to be able to produce it, not just for one person, but of course for everyone. So Fleming had produced a paper in 1929 about what he had found and like I said, nothing happened. And then about 10 years later, it was three men, Howard Flory, Ernest Chain, and Norman Heatley. They were from the University of Oxford in England and they started attacking this problem. They grew penicillium mold and containers filled with nutrient rich liquid. The mold grew across the surface and released penicillin into the liquid underneath. Then they had to separate the penicillin from that liquid.

13:58Then they needed enormous amounts of liquid to produce a tiny amount of usable penicillin. At the outset, just to treat one seriously ill patient, they needed almost 500 gallons of this culture liquid for one patient. So it became a factory. This Oxford laboratory really went at it to prove it worked. They infected mice with the dangerous bacteria. Some received penicillin, others didn't. The ones that received the penicillin survived much better. So now they had success, they had hope. It could work inside a living body. But the next step was huge. It had to work inside a human being on February 12, 1941. A 43 year old policeman named Albert Alexander became the first seriously ill patient treated with the Oxford team's purified penicillin.

14:58As the story went, he apparently got cut on a rose bush. Whether or not this happened, we really don't know. Historians dispute this. Bottom line though is he had a terrible bacterial infection. He did get cut. And by the time the doctors were treating him, he was really sick. The infection had spread, but then they gave him the penicillin. And he started getting better. Within a day, his condition improved dramatically. It was working. The doctors were beyond excited, except they only had one problem. They didn't have enough of the penicillin. The supply began running out. They were so desperate to conserve it that they collected Alexander's urine and recovered some of the penicillin. His body had passed out so they could purify it and give it back to him. But it was too late. It just wasn't enough. The treatment had to stop. The infection returned.

16:01Albert Alexander did pass away. It sounds like a failure, but scientifically, they proved that something was working. The problem was that they just didn't have enough of it. So the race was on, but there was a problem. World War II became a reality in Britain. Everything was developed. Everything had started here in Britain. But with the reality facing them, they needed to help the soldiers on the battlefield, but they were in the midst of a war. So in 1941, Howard Florian Norman, heately, traveled to the United States looking for help. And this is where everything changed. They ended up going to the United States Department of Agriculture. They had a laboratory in Peoria, Illinois. And what did they need to do? They just needed to make more penicillin. And the United States got to work. Everyone put their heads together and what they

17:04discovered was that the mold could produce much more penicillin when he was grown under the right conditions in specific large fermentation tanks. They also searched for better strains of the penicillium. In other words, molds that naturally produced larger amounts of penicillin. And then came one of the most wonderfully strange moments in scientific history. Listen to this. There was a laboratory worker. Her name was Mary Hudds. She found a moldy cantaloupe at a market in Peoria, Illinois. The mold that was growing on that cantaloupe turned out to be an excellent penicillin producer. It was unbelievable. So researchers selected and improved the strains that basically came from molds like this. And then the production went through the roof. American pharmaceutical companies joined the effort. And now that with these huge fermentation tanks and different methods that allowed the

18:06penicillin to be produced on this huge scale, that the Oxford researchers could never do back in Britain. By the time the Allied forces landed in Normandy on D-Day June 6, 1944, just a few years later, penicillin was here and available in huge amounts to help the soldiers to help all of us. So as we wrap up the podcast now, just so it's clear, what does penicillin actually do? What's actually happening in our body? Well, when bacteria, they protect themselves with the strong outer structure, right? It's their cell wall. It's like their protective wall around who they are. And they need to keep building and repairing that wall as the bacteria grows and divides and keeps multiplying, right? Well, the penicillin interferes with that construction. The bacteria can't build their cell walls properly and ultimately the walls weaken fall down and the bacteria eventually

19:08breaks apart and dies. That's why penicillin can fight bacterial infections. Not viruses. Now, think of it when we get sick. It's either a bacterial infection or it's a viral infection. Viruses, penicillin doesn't kill viruses. That's why you go to the doctor that you got to look at what the germ is, right? And whether or not they can give you penicillin, whether or not they can give you a close cousin, a moxasillin, which is that pink liquid that you get. But no, if it turns out that your germ is a virus, no. Penicillin will not and any antibiotic will not kill that virus. You just got to wait it out. So three of the four people, Alexander Fleming, Howard Flory and Ernest Chene, they won the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine, right? For the discovery of penicillin and for turning it into a treatment that saved obviously everyone's lives. Norman Healy, he didn't receive

20:14the prize even though his work was so important as well. At the time, get this. Nobel prizes can only be shared by a limited number of people so the award went only to those three. But Healy is still celebrated today because the reality was he was just important. Alexander Fleming, he passed away at the age of 73 in 1955. He was knighted. That's why he's also called Sir Alexander Fleming. Howard Flory was knighted. Ernest Chene was knighted. Flory passed away in 1968. Chene passed away in 1979 in Norman, Healy. He lived until 2004 long enough to see how much penicillin have become one of the most important medicines in history. And that brings us back all the way to the beginning. A scientist was doing his job, but he stopped and thought and he stopped and analyzed and he said,

21:18bacteria wasn't growing near a patch of mold. He could have thrown the dish away instead, he asked why. Scientists got to work and then years later in the United States, when they were desperately trying to figure out how they could make more penicillin. Mary Hunts walked into a peoria illinois food market, found a cantaloupe and found some mold on it. And the rest is history. Friends, thanks for taking this journey, learning all about Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin. Reach out to us at okay, let's learn podcast at gmail.com. We have a website okay, let's learn.com. We are on Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, Substack. You name it. We are out there on any podcast platform. And yes, you can support the show now on patreon.com. Look in the show notes for where it says support to show, appreciate it, appreciate any reviews or ratings. And

22:23until next time have fun and keep learning.