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  • Alexander Fleming: 5 Facts to Understand the Importance of the Scientist

    Alexander Fleming: 5 Facts to Understand the Importance of the Scientist

    Scottish physician and microbiologist Sir Alexander Fleming is known for being the author of one of the greatest – if not the greatest – discoveries in medicine: penicillin, the first antibiotic in history. For this feat, he won a Nobel Prize in Medicine and the title of Knight of the British Crown, among other honors. He is also considered one of the greatest scientists of all time.

    Born on August 6, 1881, on a farm in Ayrshire county, Scotland, Fleming began his academic career in 1903 at the medical school of St. Mary’s Hospital in London. He graduated as a doctor, surgeon, and bacteriologist.

    He served as a doctor in World War I, where he saw the destructive action of infections caused by bullet wounds in soldiers – which would inspire him to seek a way to kill bacteria. He died on March 11, 1955, in London, victim of a heart attack.

    Here are five facts about Alexander Fleming’s career and discoveries:

    1. A Scientist at War

    Graduated since 1908 as a doctor, surgeon, and bacteriologist, Fleming made his first major discovery during World War I. In a field hospital on the Western Front in France, he observed that many shot soldiers died of septicemia. And worse: the antiseptics used on wounds seemed to worsen the situation.

    In an article published in The Lancet in 1917, while the war was still ongoing, he described the reason for this effect: the antiseptics had a good bactericidal action on the wound surface but removed the body’s defenses against germs. As a result, the deeper bacteria gained space to infect the severely wounded areas.

    1. First Major Discovery

    After the war, Fleming persevered in the search for a medication that would alleviate the agony of infection victims. In the laboratory, he was known for being a scientist careless with hygiene, to the point that his Petri dishes frequently suffered from unexpected growth of bacterial colonies.

    One day in 1921, he decided to apply nasal mucus to one of these plates contaminated by airborne bacteria. And he noticed that the secretion killed the microorganisms. This casual revelation led to the subsequent discovery of lysozyme, an enzyme with antimicrobial action present in secretions such as mucus, tears, and saliva.

    1. The Mold That Saved Lives

    Fleming’s ability to observe and intuit accidental discoveries led him to be the author of what many consider the greatest revolution in medicine. In 1928, his research focused on staphylococcus bacteria, grown in Petri dishes.

    On September 3, upon returning to work after spending a holiday with his family, he noticed that the culture was contaminated by mold – and that the colonies that were close to the fungi were dead, unlike those more distant.

    Later he identified the fungus as Penicillium rubens, which would lead to the creation of penicillin, the first antibiotic in history.

    1. Joint Nobel Prize

    Announced by Fleming on February 13, 1929, penicillin did not impress the scientific community of the time. In fact, the discovery went more than a decade without receiving the recognition it deserved. The reason was that no practical application of the substance was seen, as no way to isolate it and produce it as a medication had been presented.

    This only happened in 1940, when biochemists Ernst Boris Chain, Howard Florey, and Norman Heatley published a study presenting the structure of penicillin and developed a method to purify and stabilize the component, enabling mass production. In 1945, Fleming, Chain, and Florey were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

    1. At the Center of Two Fake News Stories

    Two British urban legends involve the names of Alexander Fleming and Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England between 1940 and 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. The first is that Fleming’s studies were sponsored by Churchill’s father because Alexander’s father had saved young Winston from drowning in a swamp.

    The other, published by newspapers of the time, claimed that Fleming saved Churchill with penicillin when the Prime Minister contracted an infection in Tunisia in 1943. In fact, the premier was treated by the official doctor, Lord Moran, who applied a sulfonamide-based medicine, another recently discovered antibiotic substance at the time.

  • Women Scientists Erased From History by Gender Bias (Matilda Effect)

    Women Scientists Erased From History by Gender Bias (Matilda Effect)

    The genetic code, Down’s syndrome, writing the first computer program… These happenings marked significant scientific progress at the time, but the scientists who made them have been forgotten. They all had one thing in common: they were female. The Matilda effect is the official moniker for this occurrence. In the 19th century, women in Europe were essentially banned from the field of science in the name of their so-called innate inferiority.

    Sisters, mothers, spouses, and daughters of scientists contributed to the advancement of the field alongside their male counterparts, but their contributions are often overlooked, as was the case with Mileva Marić, the physicist who was married to Albert Einstein.

    Matilda Effect: The Phenomenon That Makes Women Scientists Invisible

    In 1968, sociologist Robert King Merton introduced his theory on the Matthew effect, named after a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” This theory explains how some great people have been recognized at the expense of their partners, who often participated in their research.

    Margaret W. Rossiter, a historian of science, developed and applied Robert King Merton’s theory to women in science in the early 1980s. She dubbed this phenomenon the “Matilda effect” in honor of feminist activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who, towards the close of the 19th century, had spoken out against the erasure of women from the scientific community.

    Trota of Salerno

    The gynecological treatise “De passionibus mulierum curandarum” (or “About women’s diseases”), written by the 11th-century physician and surgeon Trota of Salerno, was translated into several languages in the Middle Ages.

    It was unimaginable in those days for a woman to have such expertise. Therefore, males were given credit for the effort surrounding her numerous creations. Trota or Trotula of Salerno was actually the world’s first gynecologist.

    Jocelyn Bell Burnell

    Jocelyn Bell Burnell

    In the mid-1960s, astronomy enthusiast Jocelyn Bell started her studies in radio astronomy at the University of Cambridge, where she also began, under the supervision of astronomer Anthony Hewish, the building of a radio telescope to investigate quasars.

    Without the astronomer’s backing, she built the instrument in 1967 and made the discovery of objects that would be called pulsars. However, it was Anthony Hewish whose name appeared in the paper when her study findings were published in Nature in 1968. In 1974, he and Martin Ryle won the Nobel Prize in Physics again.

    Rosalind Franklin

    Rosalind Franklin

    British-born scientist Rosalind Franklin is now well recognized for her pivotal contribution to the identification of the DNA double helix. She did the research that led to the publication of the results in the scientific journal Nature, but it was her colleagues James Watson and Francis Crick—with whom she did not have the best working relationship—who published the results, which involved the now-famous photograph No. 51, in which the two helices of the structure of DNA are visible.

    At Maurice Wilkins’s request, both Rosalind Franklin and the scientist with whom she collaborated were solely mentioned in the acknowledgements.

    Nine years later, in 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were given the Nobel Prize in Medicine for “their” discovery of the structure of DNA.

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    The late Rosalind Franklin has been mostly forgotten since her death.

    Marthe Gautier

    Marthe Gautier

    Together with Raymond Turpin, chief of the pediatric section at the Trousseau Hospital, Marthe Gautier studied polymalformative disorders, including Down’s syndrome, in a little laboratory they set up in the 1950s. The additional chromosome she found in children with “mongolism,” the word used at the time to describe Down syndrome, was a major breakthrough.

    This finding was crucial to elucidating the disease process. Ultimately, however, credit for the discovery was given to a man named Jérôme Lejeune, and her name—spelled incorrectly—was included below Jérôme’s as the second signatory on the publication verifying the findings acquired by the French team in 1959.

    The Inserm Ethics Committee (IEC) didn’t come around to the idea that “the discovery of the supernumerary chromosome, the part of Jérôme Lejeune (…) is unlikely to have been preponderant,” until 1994.

    Mileva Einstein

    Mileva Einstein

    Mileva Einstein (Mileva Marić), the wife of Albert Einstein, was another woman who fell prey to the Matilda effect. Mileva Einstein followed in her husband’s footsteps by pursuing a profession in physics and mathematics.

    While no one doubts Albert Einstein’s brilliance, new research is focusing on Mileva Einstein’s contribution to his professional success. particularly with regard to the findings about space-time and the velocity of light.

    Especially after the pair have had a few interactions, this may come to light. And for good reason, the very gifted, Mileva Einstein regularly corrected the work of the scientist, as evidenced by this letter from 1901: “How happy and proud I shall be when we have both conducted our work on movement relative to a victorious conclusion!

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    “

    Despite this letter and others like it, Mileva Einstein’s role in Albert Einstein’s achievements is still very weakly estimated today due to a lack of evidence.

    Lise Meitner

    Lise Meitner

    At a time when higher education was difficult for women, Lisa Meitner earned a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1901. She became the second woman to receive a doctorate from the University of Vienna.

    She started working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science in 1911, in the chemistry department led by Otto Hahn.

    When the physics department was first established, she took over as its head. The partnership between Otto Hahn, a chemist, and Lise Meitner, a physicist, was very productive.

    Fritz Strassman joined the two scientists in 1934 in their pursuit of knowledge on artificial nuclear processes.

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    The discovery of fission in 1938 was crucial to the development of the atomic bomb.

    Lise Meitner, who came from a Jewish family, was forced to leave for Sweden when Austria was annexed by the Nazi authorities. Given her predicament, Lise Meitner was not credited when the group’s findings appeared in the December issue of the scholarly journal Naturwissenschaften that same year.

    Thus, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman shared the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

    Ada Lovelace

    Ada Lovelace

    The idea that a woman might be interested in, much less talented at, computer technology was unthinkable in the 1800s, when the field was still dominated by men.

    Ada Lovelace, often known as the “Princess of Parallelograms,” was a mathematician who, starting in the 1840s and continuing forward, devoted a great deal of time and energy to translating the writings of Charles Babbage (her own professor) into French. She translated it, but was she pleased with the results?

    Because, in fact, she added her own (many) insights. Among these were formulas for determining Bernoulli’s figures. In a nutshell, what Ada Lovelace created is widely recognized as the world’s first computer program today.

    Ada Lovelace gave computer science a fresh perspective by treating programming as a language. Nevertheless, her impact on computer science is mostly unknown.