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Most of us are familiar with the basic penicillin legend: a London bacteriologist notices something unusual about the mold growing in an uncleaned Petri dish and ends up making one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time. What if the only reason this medical pioneer, the son of a poor farmer, had been able to receive the education that allowed him to make this monumental scientific breakthrough was his father's chance encounter years earlier with another (future) giant of 20th century history? And, in a delicious conclusion, the scientist later used his discovery to save his benefactor's life? Wouldn't that be an astounding and inspiring coincidence? It would. If only it were true. The first clue that should make us skeptical of this too-good-to-be-true tale is that it exists in multiple forms. For example, here are a couple of other common versions: So, Alexander Fleming's father saved a young Winston Churchill from drowning in a bog. Or young Alexander Fleming himself saved a young Winston Churchill from drowning in a swimming hole. Or young Alexander Fleming helped Winston Churchill's father get his carriage out of the mud and back onto the road. Well, whatever: we've got two fathers and two sons: one of the four helped one of the other three, and one of the remaining two paid for somebody's education. Or something like that. It's a good story, so let's not weigh it down with a bunch of pesky details. The facts of none of these versions jibe with what we know of these people's lives. No Churchill biography we've found mentions young Winston's chance encounter with a Fleming, father or son. Alexander Fleming was born in a remote, rural part of Scotland and lived on an 800-acre farm that was a mile from the nearest house — not the sort of place where a vacationing Winston would have been likely to wander, or to be discovered by anyone if he had. As well, Winston was seven years older than Alexander, so young Alexander would probably have been too small to physically rescue the older and larger Winston from drowning. But we don't have to speculate about those matters to disprove the tale. Alexander Fleming did not leave the farm to rush off to medical school to become the doctor he had supposedly always longed to be. In fact, young Alec (as he was then known) departed for London when he was 14, where his older brother Tom had studied medicine and opened a practice. Alec attended the Polytechnic School in Regent Street; after graduating, he entered the business world at the urging of his brother, worked as a clerk for a shipping firm for a few years, then joined a Scottish regiment when the Boer War broke out. It was not until after all of this that Alec decided to try his hand at medical school, and even then it was the encouragement of his older brother that was the deciding factor, not a lifelong yearning on Alec's part to become a doctor. Additionally, Alec's medical school education was financed with a £250 inheritance from a recently-deceased uncle, not an endowment from a grateful Randolph Churchill. Nor is the other end of this tale true. Winston Churchill did come down with a sore throat and a high fever while in Tunis (on the way home from his December 1943 meeting with Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin in Tehran), and the diagnosis of the medical team called in from Cairo by his personal physician (Charles Wilson, later Lord Moran) was pneumonia. According to Wilson's biography, Churchill was treated with sulphonamide (an antimicrobial, but one unrelated to penicillin) and digitalis (for his heart) and sent to bed to rest. By the time a specialist, Professor John Scadding, was flown in from London, Churchill was already well on his way to recovery. In short, Alexander Fleming was neither present nor consulted when Churchill was diagnosed with pneumonia, nor was penicillin used to treat the British prime minister. According to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, Churchill publicly denied the Fleming story in 1946. This bit of netsam aside, Alexander Fleming's life has already been the subject of considerable mythologizing. His discovery of penicillin was not the instant boon to medicine that we now assume it was. In fact, Fleming himself did not realize the significance of his findings: thinking he had developed a mere antiseptic that was too slow-acting and too difficult to produce in large quantities, Fleming failed to test his penicillin thoroughly, wrote a tepidly-received paper about it, and moved on to other work. There ended his real involvement with the greatest medical advance of the 20th (or any other) century. In 1935, two specialists, Howard Florey, head of Oxford's William Dunn School of Pathology, and Ernst Chain, a Cambridge biochemistry PhD, took up where Fleming's paper left off and spent several years at the arduous laboratory work of refining and testing penicillin to produce the world's first effective antibiotic. Fleming visited the two men at the Dunn School after they published their first paper on penicillin in 1940 (by which time Chain thought Fleming was dead) and didn't reappear on the scene until after penicillin had proved itself invaluable during World War II. The press lauded the newly-emerged Fleming as the lone genius responsible for the miracle of penicillin, and he was awarded numerous honors, including a knighthood and the 1945 Nobel Prize for medicine. (The Nobel Prize committee, at least, was on the ball and named Florey and Chain as co-recipients of the honor.)
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