65th Anniversary of the Death of Sir Alexander Fleming

That the Parliament commemorates the 65th anniversary of the death of the Scottish physician, microbiologist and pharmacologist, Sir Alexander Fleming, who was born in Darvel, Ayrshire in 1881 and died on 11 March 1955; understands that Fleming worked as a shipping clerk before starting his medical studies at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London; acknowledges that he won the 1908 gold medal as top medical student at the University of London, where he originally planned to become a surgeon; notes however that a temporary position in the laboratories of the Inoculation Department at the hospital convinced him that his future lay in the new field of bacteriology; acknowledges that in 1928, while studying influenza, Fleming noticed that mould had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococci germ and that the mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself; notes that he experimented further and named the active substance, penicillin, ultimately leading to, following further work by biochemists and pharmacologists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, the drug being mass-produced as an antibiotic; recognises that the discovery of penicillin, which one of the world’s first antibiotics, marks a true turning point in not just medical but all of human history, effectively beginning the age of useful antibiotics; notes that penicillin has saved, and is still saving, millions of people around the world; further notes that Fleming received much acclaim for his work, most notably the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945, jointly with Florey and Chain, as well as the establishment of the popular London attraction, the Fleming Museum, in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital where he made his discovery, and believes that this anniversary should be used to celebrate the life and legacy of one of the most influential Scots in history.