Volume 33, Number 5 · March 27, 1986
Lucky Alec
By M.F. Perutz
Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth
by Gwyn Macfarlane
Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Few people know that in parallel with the race to produce a bomb that would kill people by the hundred thousand, scientists in England ran another race, a race to produce a drug that was to save the lives of millions. The book under review is the story of Alexander Fleming, the laconic Scotsman whose chance discovery set the race in motion. While working as a bacteriologist at a London hospital in 1928, Fleming found that a culture plate seeded with staphylococci had become contaminated with a mold. Instead of discarding it, as others might have done, he noticed something unusual: colonies of these bacteria had grown everywhere except near the mold, where he saw a clear patch. He now cultured the mold and discovered that the broth filtered from it stopped the growth of several kinds of deadly bacteria. Publication of his discovery in a scientific journal stirred up hardly a ripple, and he did little more about it.
Review, 4302 words
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