Aubrey Weese
English 301-N01

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Narration Assignment - Final Revision

Imagine stepping into a dark, cluttered laboratory full of strange smells, a fantastic mess of equipment which you have no idea what it does piled everywhere, and bubbling beakers full of brightly colored solutions.  It could be the home of a mad scientist from an old novel or science fiction movie, or; simply replace the bubbling beakers with an array of brightly colored culture dishes, and it could have been the laboratory of Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), bacteriologist.  

'Alec' Fleming was not known as the world's neatest scientist. In fact, he actually abhorred a tidy and meticulous lab, his creative mind preferring to have culture dishes piled up all over the place, following what Max Delbruck would later coin the "principle of limited sloppiness." Fleming himself would say that he liked to "play with microbes." When not using them for purely scientific purposes, he liked to make germ paintings with highly-pigmented bacteria, among other things.

During World War I, he worked with Dr. Almroth Wright, head of the "Inoculation Department" of St. Mary's College to try to stop the rampant infections in the soldier's wounds, which killed many. Fleming would isolate the bacteria in these wounds and put them in culture dishes in lab to study them. One day a few years later, in his typical messy style, Fleming left the lids off a bunch of staphylococcus (a bacteria commonly found in meat products that can cause food poising) culture dishes just piled in the sink, and went on vacation, intending to clean them up when he got back home.

Directly under Fleming's laboratory was a makeshift lab where a young Irish scientist C.J. La Touche worked. La Touche was a mycologist -- someone who studies fungi. La Touche happened to be studying a special mold at this time, Penicillin notatum, but he didn't have a fume hood in his lab, so the air became full of mold spores. Fleming, on the other hand, had a sticky window in his lab, which he couldn't force to open. When it got hot, he left the door open, a door that opened into the same stairwell La Touche's did, and allowed, to the fortune of future generations, some little mold spores to exchange rooms.

When Fleming got back from vacation, something in the culture on the very top of the pile stopped him from throwing it immediately into the cleaning solution. In the culture was a little tuft of blue mold, and in a circle all around the mold, all the bacteria was dead. Fleming quickly realized that this was a valuable discovery, and went about inserting this fungus into others cultures and doing experiments. He found out it killed many different kinds of bacteria and would kill staphylococcus even when diluted 800 times. He suspected it would be useful against infections like the ones that had killed so many soldiers in World War I, so he took a sample of the mold and identified it as Penicillin notatum. But Fleming was a bacteriologist, not a chemist, so he didn't know how to purify the substance or make it into a medicine. He quit doing any research on it, but still kept it sitting around in his lab.

A few years later a team of three scientists - Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Norman Heatley, read some of Fleming's papers on Penicillin, and decided to write him and get a sample of the fungus. These scientists were biochemists and were able to take the next step with penicillin, getting it into a form usable by humans.

Penicillin works by preventing new bacteria cells to form a cell wall while the cells are dividing. The cell wall is made of criss-crossed links of sugar molecules called polymers arranged kind of like a stretchy chain link fence. The wall is vital to the health of the cell because it keeps it from filling with water and eventually exploding. The links in this cell wall are held together by a special enzyme called transpeptidase. Penicillin blocks the action of this enzyme, inhibiting the links between the chains of sugar molecules from forming, and creating very weak places in the cell wall. Water seeps in through these weak places and the new bacteria cells explode.

Fleming eventually became world-famous for the discovery of this wonderful medicine, and is called "The Father of Modern Antibiotics." In 1945 Fleming, Florey and Chain won the Nobel Prize in Physiology. And, as a fitting end to the story - the first public use of penicillin was to cure infected soldiers during World War II.

References

1. What the Heck is Penicillin? Brown, John C. 1996

2. Alexander Fleming Comfort, Nathaniel C.

3. Luck favours only the prepared mind Kauffman, G. B. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chicago. 1990

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