Biography
Sir Alexander Fleming was born in East Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1881. After some basic schooling, Fleming took up worked in a shipping office for four years. At the age of 24, however, he inherited some money from his uncle, John Fleming, and decided to follow in his older brother's footsteps and become a physician. He enrolled at St Mary's Hospital in London and after graduation stayed on as an assistant bacteriologist under Sir Almroth Wright, an early pioneer in immunology. During WWI, Fleming served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps and worked in several battlefield hospitals. After the war, he returned to St Mary's where he became a professor of bacteriology in 1928.
Discovery
After seeing so many soldiers die from infected wounds, Fleming began searching for anti-bacterial agents. Antiseptics were popular during the war, but Fleming found that they were actually harming the immune system more than bacteria. His search for a better way to kill invading bacteria would lead him to serendipitously discover the world's first antibiotic, penicillin. Fleming was notorious for keeping a messy lab and before his vacation in August 1928, stacked his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in his laboratory. Upon his return he found that one culture has been contaminated by a fungus but that staphylococci near the fungus had been destroyed while colonies further away survived.
It is in this spirit that we launch JSUR, with the belief that serendipitous and unexpected scientific results merit exploration and discussion because they may lead to interesting scientific discoveries.
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