Question: whos your favorite scientist?

Amy MacQueen answered on 22 Jun 2011:

Hi cox!

I think I mentioned Sir Alexander Fleming to you in the chat? He was pretty cool and was instrumental in the discovery of penicillin! I think I like him for a lot of reasons – he was born in August (me too!) in Scotland (me too!) and his dad was a farmer (my dad is too!). He was in the army medical corps during WW1 (hmmm…I wasn’t) and worked at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School at the University of London when he came back.

In 1928, while he was studying influenza, he noticed that mould had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococci germ. The mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. What I think is super-cool about this is that he noticed something amazing happening when other people would have overlooked it as a mistake! He was a good thinker!

Fleming experimented further and named the active substance penicillin (the mould was producing this and using it to kill the bug!).

Fleming wrote loads of science papers on bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1943 and knighted in 1944. In 1945 he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine!!
Penicillin is important as an antibiotic – and since its discovery we have found many more. Penicillin has saved millions of lives!!

But its a toughie…because without the work of a lot of eminent scientists we wouldn’t be where we are now! Two other very important guys were Sir Isaac Newton and his arch nemesis, Robert Hooke. There is not even a surviving portrait of Robert Hooke but he designed the compound microscope and first discovered “cells” – in fact it was he who coined the term!

Sorry this answer was so long but I hope you found it interesting!! 🙂