The Times Great Lives

Sir Alexander Fleming

Discoverer of penicillin

11 March 1955

Sir Alexander Fleming, d.sc, mb, frcp, frcs, frs, the discoverer of penicillin, died suddenly yesterday at his home in London of a heart attack at the age of 73.

Alexander Fleming, the son of a farmer, was born at Lochfield, near Darvel, in Ayrshire, on August 6, 1881. He received his early education at the village school and at Kilmarnock Academy. At 13 years of age he was sent to live with his brother in London, where, for the next two or three years, he continued his education by attending the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street. At that time he displayed no particular scientific ability nor felt any urge to be a doctor. For some years he worked in a shipping office in Leadenhall Street, but he found office routine deadly dull and after four years in the City a small legacy enabled him to escape. The brother with whom he was living had already taken his medical degree and he encouraged his younger brother to take up medicine. Thus at the age of 20 he became a student at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, winning the senior entrance scholarship in natural science. He showed that he had found his true bent by winning almost every class prize and scholarship during his student career. He qualified in 1906 and at the mb, bs examination of London University in 1908 he obtained honours and was awarded a gold medal.

In 1909 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1906 he had begun to assist Sir Almroth Wright in the inoculation department at St Mary’s Hospital, and this association led to his taking up the study of bacteriology. Under the stimulating influence of Wright, who was at that time engaged in his researches on the opsonic theory, he acquired great experience and skill in bacteriological technique and in clinical pathology. For recreation he attended the drills and parades of the London Scottish, which he had joined as a private in the year before he resigned from his post with the shipping company. For some years he went to the annual camp and, being a fair shot, to the meetings at Bisley. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he resigned from the London Scottish so that he could go to France as a captain in the ramc. He worked in Sir Almroth Wright’s laboratory in the Casino at Boulogne and received a mention in dispatches. At the end of the war he returned to St Mary’s as assistant to Sir Almroth Wright and was also appointed lecturer in bacteriology in the medical school. He subsequently became director of the department of systematic bacteriology and assistant director of the inoculation department. For some years he acted as pathologist to the venereal disease department at St Mary’s and was also pathologist to the London Lock Hospital. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London, the post being tenable at St Mary’s. He retired with the title emeritus in 1948, but continued at St Mary’s as head of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Micro-Biology. Though last year he formally handed over the reins to Professor R. Cruikshank, he continued his own research work there and only the day before yesterday was at the institute discussing plans for the lecture tour in the Middle East he had been asked to undertake by the British Council.

Fleming’s first notable discovery, that of lysozyme, was made in 1922. He had for some time been interested in antiseptics and in naturally occurring antibacterial substances. In culturing nasal secretion from a patient with an acute cold he found a remarkable element that had the power of dissolving bacteria. This bacteriolyte element, which he also found in tears and other body fluids, he isolated and named lysozyme.

A Lucky Accident

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 when Fleming was engaged in bacteriological researches on staphylococci. For examination purposes he had to remove the covers of his culture plates and a mould spore drifted on to a plate. After a time it revealed itself by developing into a colony about half an inch across. It was no new thing for a bacteriologist to find that a mould had grown on a culture plate which had lain on the bench for a week, but the strange thing in this particular case was that the bacterial colonies in the neighbourhood of the mould appeared to be fading away. What had a week before been vigorous staphylococcus colonies were now faint shadows of their former selves. Fleming might have merely discarded the contaminated culture plate but fortunately his previous research work on antiseptics and on naturally occurring antibacterial substances caused him to take special note of the apparent anti-bacterial action of the mould.

He made sub-cultures of the mould and investigated the properties of the antibacterial substance. He found that while the crude culture fluid in which the mould had grown was strongly antibacterial it was non-toxic to animals and human beings. The crude penicillin was, however, very unstable and was too weak and too crude for injection. Early attempts at concentration were not very successful, and after a few tentative trials its clinical use was not pursued, although it continued to be used in Fleming’s laboratory for differential culture. The position in 1929 was that Fleming had discovered and named penicillin, had investigated its antibacterial power, and had suggested that it might be useful as an antiseptic applied to infected lesions. Attempts to produce a concentrated extract capable of clinical application were not successful and had been abandoned. In the light of later knowledge Fleming’s original paper of 1929 was remarkable. It covered nearly the whole field, realized most of the problems and made considerable progress in solving them. The resuscitation of penicillin as a chemotherapeutic agent was due to the brilliant work of Sir Howard Florey and his colleagues at Oxford, notably Dr E. B. Chain.

Overwhelmed with Honours

After the establishment of penicillin as a life-saving drug Fleming was overwhelmed with honours. He was knighted in 1944 and in the following year he shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Sir Howard Florey and Dr E. B. Chain. He was William Julius Mickle Fellow of London University in 1942, and received an award of merit from the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association in 1943. He was elected frs in 1943 and frcp in 1944, under the special by-law. His other honours included the Moxon medal of the Royal College of Physicians (1945), the Charles Mickle Fellowship of Toronto University (1944), the John Scott medal of the City Guild of Philadelphia (1944), the Cameron prize of Edinburgh University (1945), the Albert Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Arts (1946), the honorary Gold Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons (1946), the Actonian Prize of the Royal Institution, and the honorary Freedom of the Boroughs of Paddington, Darvel, and Chelsea. He had innumerable honorary degrees from British and foreign universities, and in 1951 was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Only last weekend thieves stole property from his flat in Chelsea worth about £1,000 and later an appeal was made to them to return a gold seal of great sentimental value.

Fleming was president of the London Ayrshire Society and of the Pathological and Comparative Medicine Sections of the Royal Society of Medicine. Apart from the papers describing his great discoveries, he contributed to the Medical Research Council System of Bacteriology, to the official Medical History of the 1914–18 War, and to many other publications. He was a keen amateur painter, and he had many friends among artists. He was also very fond of motoring and of gardening. He remained quite unspoiled by the publicity and acclaim that came to him and no one was more aware than he of the indispensable part played by other investigators in the development of penicillin. Animated by the spirit of the true scientist, he looked ever forward.

He was twice married, first to Sarah Marion, daughter of Mr John McElroy. She died in 1949, leaving a son. In 1953 he married Dr Amalia Coutsouris, of Athens, who had been a member of his staff at the Wright-Fleming Institute.

Albert Einstein

Father of nuclear physics

18 April 1955

Professor Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of modern times, died in hospital at Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18 at the age of 76. He had lived a secluded life for some years, though he had been a member of the staff of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University.

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, on March 14, 1879. A year later his family moved to Munich, where they remained until he was 15. His parentage was Jewish, but few Jewish usages were observed in his home. He was slow in learning to talk and at the Catholic elementary school which he first attended was known as Biedermeier (‘Honest John’) from his ponderously accurate way of speaking. Both here and at the Luitpold Gymnasium, where the educational system was rigid, he saw little difference between school and barrack. His father, Hermann, had a small electro-chemical factory, but he had a greater genius for living than he had for success. Failing in Munich he moved to Milan and later to Pavia. The son, left unhappily at the gymnasium, was well on the way to manoeuvring his departure from it when he was unexpectedly asked to leave as being ‘disruptive’ of his class. Italy gave him as great an interest in art and music as he already had in Schiller, and the affairs of his father enforced him to seek a career. He had speculated at the age of five on the movement of a compass needle, and he knew that his mathematics, if not his other subjects, were well beyond the usual examination requirements. Combining interest and ability, he arrived at theoretical physics as the field that would most attract him but partly because of his father’s work and partly from his own lack of formal attainment, he thought that technological training would be his best approach. He therefore proposed to study at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich, but was at first rejected. He had to qualify for the diploma in modern languages and biology at a cantonal school at Aarau. There he lost his dislike of schooling, and from the age of 17 until the age of 21 he conscientiously followed the course prescribed at Zürich for a teacher of physics and mathematics. In 1901 he became a Swiss citizen – a reflection of his dislike of authority.

Annus Mirabilis, 1905

Partly on account of his ancestry, he had difficulty in finding a teaching post, but by the influence of a fellow student he was appointed as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office at Berne in 1902. This was the ‘cobbler’s job’, which he maintained later was the way that scientists should earn their living. In the next year he married Mileva Maritsch, a fellow student at the Polytechnic. Two sons were born in quick succession, but there were differences of temperament and interest, and the marriage was dissolved after some years.

Einstein’s first contribution to theoretical physics was made in the same year that he obtained his Patent Office job. Three years later was his annus mirabilis, 1905. Then he burst without warning into an extraordinary range of discovery and new ideas, of which the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was one part, not at the time the most comprehensible by his colleagues. In his earliest work he had simplified Boltzmann’s theory of the random motions of the molecules of a gas, and in 1905 he applied this method to the ‘Brownian movement’ – the impetuous, irregular motion of microscopic particles, suspended in a fluid, that is produced by molecular bombardment. Einstein showed how the number of molecules per unit of volume could be inferred from measurements made of the distances travelled by the visible particles which they hit. Such measurements, made later by Perrin, verified Einstein’s theory so well that the Brownian movement has ever since been regarded as one of the most direct – and impressive – pieces of evidence for the reality of molecules.

In the same year Einstein advanced a revolutionary theory of the photo-electric effect, which has exercised a decisive influence on the modern quantum theory of light. The essence of this effect is that the speed with which electrons are liberated from a metal surface illuminated by ultraviolet light depends only on the colour of the light and not on its brightness. Einstein suggested that the light (from which the escaping electrons must derive their energy) is not continuously distributed in space, but is like a gas with a discrete molecular structure – the ‘molecules’ being photons or units of radiant energy of amounts proportional to the frequency of the light. This assumption gave a concrete physical mechanism for the quantum theory of white light advanced by Planck in 1900, and it provided satisfactory estimates of the speed of photo-electrons. But the importance of Einstein’s theory of photons far transcended the occasion of its suggestion. Its real significance is that it accustomed physicists to accept the dual character of light, which sometimes behaves like a continuous train of waves, and sometimes a hail of bullets, and that in 1924 it suggested to de Broglie that matter itself had a similar ‘dual personality’ and could behave either as a wave or a corpuscle. These conceptions have dominated all subsequent speculations about the ultimate elements of matter and light.

Special Theory of Relativity

Although Einstein’s researches in the quantum theory were of vital significance and, in one direction, seemed to show a clearer grasp of its implications than was possessed by its originator, it is with the theories of relativity that his name will always be associated. The ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was published in the same extraordinary year. It expressed in a simple and systematic form the effects produced on the basic instruments of physics – the ‘rigid’ scale and the perfect clock – by relative motion, and thus codified the earlier mathematical investigations of Voigt, the physical speculations of Larmor and the pioneer work of Lorentz. For the first time the optics of moving media received a satisfactory formulation, and Newtonian dynamics itself was generalized so as to express the effect of motion on apparent mass. In particular, Einstein’s deduction that mass and energy are proportional became the basic law of atomic transformation. Apart from its spectacular demonstration in atomic energy, it is supported also by a host of experiments in nuclear physics, in which it is used daily as a tool with which nuclear physicists work. Equally, the design of large engineering machines, such as ‘synchrotrons’, in which nuclear particles are accelerated to high energies, depends directly on its use.

In this group of varied and important publications he showed at once qualities of imagination and insight which were even more vital to his work than mathematical ability, which indeed was a necessary qualification but was not (by the highest standards) exceptional. It was also well for his immediate career that he had more than one contribution to offer.

As soon as the remarkable researches published by Einstein in 1905 became known many attempts were made to secure for him a professorial post. As a result of these efforts he became a Privatdozent at Berne in 1908 and Professor extraordinarius at Zürich in 1909. In 1911 he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, but returned to Zürich to the corresponding post in 1912. During 1913 Planck and Nernst persuaded Einstein to go to Berlin as director of the projected research institute for physics, as a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science and as a professor in the University of Berlin – with no duties or obligations. He occupied this post until 1933.

General Theory of Relativity

The ‘General Theory of Relativity’, published in 1916, was the fruit of many years of speculation by Einstein on the questions: ‘Can we distinguish the effects of gravitation and of acceleration?’ and ‘Are light rays bent by gravity?’ To answer these questions he was led to build a great and complex theory, which needs for its systematic expression a new mathematical discipline invented by Ricci and Levi-Civita. The divergences between the predictions of the planetary theory based on Einstein’s theory and those based on the classical theory of Newton are all extremely small, but in one case (the slow changes in the orbit of Mercury) Einstein’s theory provides an explanation which had never been found on Newtonian principles. Moreover, it successfully predicted the deflection of light from distant stars as it grazed the sun’s disc – an effect subsequently verified by British astronomical expeditions in 1919 – and also the reddening of light from very massive stars – which was much later confirmed by observations on the dark companion of Sirius. The success with which ‘general relativity’ gave quantitative predictions of the new phenomena has created a presumption in its favour which has substantially survived.

The application of general relativity to cosmology was implicit in Einstein’s original theory, but became explicit through a modification which he introduced into it in 1917. His contribution in this field was an attempt to provide an answer to an old and ‘insoluble’ problem: ‘How can the universe of stars be uniform in density, fill all space and yet be of finite total mass?’ The subsequent relation of observational evidence of ‘the expanding universe’ to the possible forms of theory that might be developed was done mainly by others, including Lemaître, de Sitter, and Eddington, to whom Einstein served as a stimulus.

During the 1914–18 war two other notable events occurred in his life – he refused to sign the ‘Manifesto of Ninety-two German Intellectuals’ which identified German culture and German militarism, and he contracted a second marriage, with his cousin Elsa. In 1921 he appeared publicly as a supporter of Zionism and he actively collaborated with Weizmann in the establishment of the University of Jerusalem. During the post-war years he travelled and lectured in Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the United States (where he not only lectured on relativity but took part in Weizmann’s campaign for the Jewish National Fund), and England (where he lectured at King’s College, London, and calmed the fears of the Archbishop of Canterbury that relativity was a threat to theology). In 1922 he lectured in Paris, Shanghai, and Kobe, returning home via Palestine and Spain.

The Nobel Prize

In the same year he was awarded a Nobel prize, strangely enough, for his work in quantum theory, as the committee were not sure whether his theory of relativity was technically a ‘discovery’! He was awarded a Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1925. He visited South America in 1925 and lectured at Pasadena (California) during the winters of 1930–31, 1931–32, and 1932–33. In the summer of 1932 he lectured at Oxford, and was made an honorary Doctor of Science. The great purge of Jewish scientists began under Hitler in 1933 and Einstein decided not to return to Germany, where scientific freedom had ceased to exist. He lived for some months at La Cocque in Belgium and resigned from the Prussian Academy. In the winter of 1933, at the invitation of Flexner, he emigrated to America and became a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a post which he held until 1945. His second wife, Elsa, had died in 1936.

Indeterminacy Opposed

In his later years he was venerated – and loved – but became somewhat isolated in his work from the main stream of modern physics. Remembering his early contribution to the quantum theory, it might have been supposed that he would have accepted readily the principle of indeterminacy, which came to play so large a part in it, and that, in his quest for a further unification of the laws of Nature, he would have tried to weld together the discontinuous and indeterminate picture given by the quantum theory with the continuous and determinate picture of relativity. But for Einstein physics was firmly rooted in causality; God did not play at dice, and he would not admit the ultimate validity of any theory based on chance or indeterminacy. The quantum theory remained, therefore, for him as a passing phase, however important to working physicists. Instead, he attempted further generalizations of relativity, which should incorporate both gravitation and electromagnetism, together with the nuclear fields of force. This work, however, has received no better reception than have all other ‘unified field theories’.

When we consider the basic character of the problems he attacked, the vast cosmical scale on which he worked, and his immense influence on physical cosmology as well as physics, we can only compare Einstein with Newton. If Newton’s central achievement was to establish the reign of gravitation in its full simplicity and universality, the essence of Einstein’s work was to reveal gravitation as a phenomenon expressible in terms of world geometry.

Humphrey Bogart

An actor of authority

14 January 1957

Mr Humphrey Bogart, the American actor, died yesterday in Hollywood. He was 57. For over 20 years – since his playing of the Dillinger-like part of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, which won him much praise – his seamed, sardonic cast of countenance and mordant tongue had been familiar to cinema audiences all over the world.

Bogart was born in New York on June 23, 1899, the son of Dr Belmont Bogart, a physician, and his wife, who as Maud Humphrey had made a name for herself as a watercolour artist and commercial illustrator. He was educated at Trinity School, New York, and at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, whence he was destined to go to Yale, but this intention was not fulfilled. The United States had entered the First World War and Bogart joined the Navy. He had always been attracted to the theatre and as soon as the war ended he joined the staff of a promoter of theatrical ventures as manager of a travelling company. But he was determined to act and made his way to New York, where he made his first appearance in 1922 in Drifting.

Thereafter he appeared regularly in plays and it was not until 1930 that he went to Hollywood. Of his first efforts he himself later said they were ‘a flop’. He returned to the stage and it was only after the success of the play The Petrified Forest that he again turned to the screen, to make an immediate impact with the film of the play with Leslie Howard and Miss Bette Davis.

There followed many other films, and notable among his earlier successes was Dead End, in which Bogart played the part of a gangster; and a gangster on the screen he often was, but a gangster with a difference. If Mr Clark Gable may be said to stand in the parts he plays for the uninhibited American male, the happy extrovert whom every college boy would wish to be, the lad for the girls and the lad for the liquor, Bogart represented a contrasting, yet allied, type of American hero.