Visiting the birthplace of penicillin

Dozens of Petri dishes and test-tubes litter the surface of the 12ft wooden bench. An archaic Bunsen burner and microscope stand beside a small, dirty sink. A few medical textbooks lean against the green ceramic tiles that line the room, while a copy of The Times dated September 3, 1928, lies to one side. These are the unassuming conditions in which one of the great scientific discoveries was made 75 years ago.

This is the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, in the very room where the Scottish bacteriologist made his chance find. The museum, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, is one of London’s best-kept secrets. . .

Ten years ago the hospital decided to recreate the cramped and chaotic conditions under which Fleming worked, and assembled as many original or contemporary instruments, books and specimens as it could find. There’s one inaccuracy, however. “In reality several of the Petri dishes would have been overflowing with cigarette ash,” Kevin Brown, the museum’s curator, says. “Fleming had a 60-a-day habit and the laboratory would have been filled with smoke because he refused to open the windows.”

Fleming’s hygiene standards would shock a modern hospital administrator. He liked to create what he called “germ paintings”, by using spores of pigmented bacteria to form brightly-coloured scenes, and would often leave culture dishes lying around unwashed for weeks. It was this very lack of order, of course, that proved fortunate.

On September 3, 1928, Fleming returned to the laboratory after a fortnight’s holiday and grudgingly decided to do some washing up. He noticed, however, that in one of the dishes the bacteria in the agar culture had been killed in a ring around a clump of mould. “That’s funny,” Fleming remarked — a typically understated response from a man of few words. He first called the substance “mould juice”, although it was soon renamed when he discovered that the bacteria-killing enzyme was from the Penicillium notatum strain. . .

Medical practices advanced greatly during the Second World War and in 1945 Professor Fleming was given a tour of a modern, and very clean, new laboratory. “It’s very nice,” he told a journalist, “but I could never have discovered penicillin here.”

Posted by David on March 22, 2003 4:48 PM