THE WASHINGTON POST and TIMES HERALD Saturday, March 12, 1955 Alexander Fleming, Discovered Penicillin Sir Alexander Fleming, whose accidental discovery of penicillin forerunner of all wonder drugs ranked him within his own lifetime among the major benefactors of humankind, died yesterday of a heart attack in London. He was 73. The shy, soft spoken Scot triggered a whole new concept of bacteriological medicine with his discovery that an ordinary garden mold was sudden death to germs. His find inaugurated vast new pharmaceutical industries throughout the world, yet he derived not a personal penny from it, giving freely of his discovery and follow up advice in the interest of suffering humanity everywhere. At his bedside when the end came was his second wife, Amalia, herself a bacteriologist, a Greek born 41 year old Red resistance leader to whom he was wed two years ago. Knighted 11 years ago, Dr. Fleming was the brilliant son of a poor Scottish farmer only 41 years of age when he made his momentous discovery in the modest green tiled research laboratory of St. Marys Hospital in London. Through an open window of his laboratory in 1928 a windblown spore landed on one of his exposed plates of bacteriological cultures and he noted that the blue mold which surrounded it raised havoc with the germ growth. Painstakingly, he identified the particular mold penicillium whence came the formal name of the drug which was to revolutionize the treatment of infection around the globe. Even as the little spore laid waste to some of the germs on his laboratory plate, so did it merely retard the growth of others and left still others completely unaffected. To others was left the task of developing the all powerful mold for drug use and in comparatively quick succession there emerged from the studies of penicillin such medical household names as aurecomycin, streptomycin and cortisone, to name only a few. Born August 6, 1881, in Ayrshire, Scotland, Dr. Fleming went to London in the early 1890s and worked for several years in a shipping office before becoming a medical student. In 1902 he won the senior open scholarship in natural science at St. Marys Hospital and from that time on followed an award filled academic career. His first wife, Sarah McElroy, bore him a son, also a student at St. Marys. He married Dr. Amalia Coutsouris, of Athens, a member of his staff at the institute, Associated Press SIR ALEXANDER FLEMING four years after the death of his first wife in 1949. A heroine in her own right, Lady Fleming risked her life time and again during World War II hiding isolated British officers and soldiers in her home in the German occupied Greek capital. Only the wars end saved her from the execution of a death sentence imposed by the Nazis for these exploits. Penicillin was perfected for mass use in the early 1940s in time to save countless military lives which without it must have been sacrificed to the dread gangrene of infected wounds. Its wartime mass production paved the way for its massive use by civilians in 1945. Ironically, Dr. Fleming felt called upon in recent years to warn against the too free use of his brainchild. On several occasions he made public his fears that reckless use of the wonder drug would enable the germs it fought so successfully to set up an immunity to it. He cited the increasing frequency of individuals on whom it either failed to work at all or in whom it set up unfavorable physical reaction. In almost every case, such individuals had been subjected to massive and frequent doses in the medical history of their complaint. It was 10 years after Dr. Flemings revolutionary discovery that Drs. Howard Florey and Ernst B. Chain finally produced penicillin in its usable crystalline form. Among the world wide honors its discovery brought to Dr. Fleming, in addition to his knighthood, was the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945, which Drs. Florey and Chain shared with him.