Brown Penicillin Man

Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution
1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5347-4
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Penicillin revolutionized healthcare and turned the modest, self-effacing Alexander Fleming into a world hero. This book tells the story of the man and his discovery set against a background of the transformation of medical research from 19th-century individualism through to teamwork and modern-day international big business.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brown, Kevin

Leseproben

Preface

This is the book I never intended to write and yet that I was fated to write. When I was appointed Archivist to St Mary’s Hospital and Medical School back in 1989, I consciously decided to avoid doing anything at all connected with Fleming. The subject already seemed to have been done to death, and the controversy surrounding the rival claims of Fleming, Florey and Chain still aroused violent passions, especially at St Mary’s, where Fleming spent most of his career. It is a lesson never to say ‘never’. Very soon I was sweating blood to set up the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum and, without intending to do so, I had become something of an authority on Fleming. I resisted all entreaties to write a biography until I could resist no more.

The more I have researched the subject, the more it has seemed that a new approach to Fleming’s life and the history of penicillin and a new book are timely. The existing biographies have suffered from too partisan an approach, either glorifying Fleming or knocking him from his pedestal. The more I have learned of the subject, the more unsatisfactory some of these earlier accounts have appeared to be, suggesting the need for an independent and exhaustively researched account that is not partly polemic in intent. There is enough credit to go around and to spare. Any book is partly a product of its own time, and fears that the antibiotic age in medicine ushered in by the work of Fleming may be about to end makes a re-examination at the start of the twenty-first century especially topical.

When I began to research this book, I had not realised just how far I would travel geographically in my quest. Naively, I expected to find most of my material in and around London, with Fleming’s papers deposited at the British Library, Florey’s at the Royal Society, Chain’s at the Wellcome Institute Library and the archives of St Mary’s Hospital in my own charge. Instead my mission took me to Sweden, across the United States and to Greece. In the course of this undertaking, I have had the help of many old friends and I have made many new friends, eager to offer what assistance they could.

Fleming himself has been a constant and congenial, if sometimes shadowy, companion throughout. At times his silences have been frustrating, but they have made all the more rewarding the times when those rare but revealing phrases or words of his have unexpectedly brought him vividly to life and given an insight into who he was. Actors say that it is more difficult to play a good character, often a very internalised personality, than an extrovert villain. Equally, it has been a challenge to portray a good, very likeable man, who rarely expressed his feelings and who was often overshadowed by being surrounded by larger-than-life personalities with their hearts too openly on their sleeves. Although it is often said that he was more interesting as a scientist than as a man, what lay beneath the apparently dour, intensely reserved outer carapace has continued to attract and fascinate the public ever since penicillin first found fame. The great challenge is to show why.

Chance famously played a large part in Fleming’s life and work; I too have been amazed at some of the unplanned coincidences that have dogged my researches. Indeed, he and penicillin have seemed inescapable even when I haven’t sought them out. I remember once visiting Barcelona, walking round the corner from my hotel and finding a bust of Fleming in front of me in a square named in his honour. I was invited to deliver the 2001 Andrew J. Moyer Lecture at the United States Department of Agriculture National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research at Peoria, Illinois, exactly sixty years after Howard Florey and Norman Heatley arrived there to get penicillin production under way in the New World. That was planned, but going to Athens exactly fifty years after Fleming’s tour of Greece in 1952 to consult the Fleming papers his widow had taken back to Greece with her was a complete coincidence. Indeed I was only yards away from where he had proposed to Amalia on the same day fifty years before.

There was also a coincidence of atmosphere. My researches into the Second World War development of penicillin in the United States took me to a country where the America of 7 December 1941 had more than a resonance in the nation in the aftermath of 9/11. The sense of impending unease and fears of the threat of terrorist outrages as war against Iraq approached in late 2002 and early 2003 forged a link with the urgency of the mood in the archival documents from sixty years previously that I had been studying in Washington DC, Philadelphia, New Brunswick and New York. There was nothing like being imaginatively immersed in the feel of the time being studied. Working in my day job at St Mary’s, the institution with which Fleming was intimately involved for so long, and knowing some of the people who had known him there brought the deepest of all creative links to the past.

Undoubtedly, penicillin was one of the defining discoveries of the twentieth century; it has affected everyone and continues to be relevant to this day. The themes of the importance of individual contributions as opposed to collective effort, the role of war as an agent of change, the role of chance and the story of a man prepared to take advantage of serendipity are all of universal relevance. For contemporary scientists the story of penicillin has lessons about the need to be flexible with different research strategies suitable for different situations and the need to communicate with the public if their work is not to be ignored or distorted. Fortunately for me in retelling that story, penicillin is perhaps one of the most accessible to the non-scientist of almost all discoveries. It is something we can all relate to. I vividly remember as an 8-year-old first learning the story of Fleming and a teacher demonstrating the discovery of penicillin with a mouldy orange. With hindsight I am also conscious that I myself might not be here without penicillin. As a young woman my mother had meningitis at a time when antibiotics were coming into use to treat this sometimes lethal infection. Perhaps this gives me all the more incentive to look behind the accepted story of Fleming and try to establish what really happened.

While this interpretation of the penicillin story and of Fleming is my own, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to many people around the world who have given me assistance in so many ways. I can only apologise in advance to anyone whom I may have inadvertently missed out. Dr Robert Fleming, son of Alexander Fleming, has always been supportive of, and interested in, the various forays I have made into aspects of his father’s life and work. Although this is in no way an official biography, the generosity with information and the support for my task from Robert have been greatly appreciated, and this book would have been the poorer without them. Biography, by its nature, if it is to tell the truth, must be intrusive, and I am grateful to all who knew Fleming who have shared their memories of him with me. He was a man who compartmentalised his life and rarely showed himself in the round to others. Only by talking to a range of the people still alive who knew him in different spheres have I been able to see how others perceived him and connect the different aspects he showed to them. I wish to thank, in particular, Bill Frankland, Barbara Gammon (née Parry), George Bonney, Keith Rogers, Felix Eastcott, John Ballantyne, John Crawford Adams, the late Jack Suchet, the late Andrew Matthews, Frank Diggins, Giles Romanes, Wolfgang Suschitsky, Phyllis French (née Norton), Ian Craddock, Diana Morley, Margaret Parfitt, Barbara Webb, John Hofmeyr and Edith Dee. Unfortunately Norman Heatley, the last surviving member of the Oxford team, was too frail to be interviewed again for this book. Boyd Woodruff has kindly shared with me his memories of wartime production at Merck in the United States and, with David Pramer, of Selman Waksman of Rutgers University, who coined the very word ‘antibiotic’. Tom Lees and Elmer Gaden have shared with me something of the atmosphere at Pfizer, where modern fermentation methods of penicillin production were first introduced on an industrial scale. Margaret Child and Jessie Carter have both vividly described what it was like to be the recipient of penicillin in the early days. Gilbert Shama has drawn my attention to material on wartime German involvement with penicillin. Over the years I have had many discussions on Almroth Wright with his biographer Michael Dunnill.

At St Mary’s, I must express my gratitude to St Mary’s NHS Trust for encouraging me in the writing of this book. There has been interest in my progress from many people throughout the Trust, but I wish to thank in particular Julian Nettel, Chief Executive, the Baroness Hanham, Chairman, and Jill Blowers for their interest in the project. Nor can I forget Alasdair Fraser, who has constantly urged, if not nagged, for many years that this was a book waiting for me to write it. The St Mary’s Hospital Association has given some sponsorship, for which I am grateful. In thanking the then Chairman of the Association, Averil Mansfield, I wish to thank all the Executive Committee and alumni who make up the membership. I must also thank the Lord Glenarthur for his interest in Fleming and this book, going back to his time as Trust Chairman, when he, Simon, was a keen supporter of the idea of setting up the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. It was from this time too that I owe a debt to Professors Alan Glynn and Charles Easmon for their elucidation of the bacteriology behind Fleming’s work. Stuart Philip has also helped with my understanding of the practical side of this science at...