Story of penicillin told at World Congress of Pharmacology

The world’s first penicillin patient was a police officer from the postcard-perfect village of Wooten, just outside Oxford.

The story goes that Constable Albert Alexander was pruning his rose bush, pricked his finger and later developed bacterial septicemia.

He was taken to hospital and treated with a new wonder drug, whose discovery is credited to Scots physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming.

However, in the treatment’s infancy, there were inadequate supplies and he died in March 1941.

The story is all the more tragic because the police officer, who had been more or less dead by the time they treated him, had recovered enough to sit up in bed and drink cups of tea before his condition worsened.

To compound his family's grief, after his death the police seized the family home and his wife Edith and children, Sheila and Brian, were evicted.

With no welfare state to support the stricken family, the children were sent to an orphanage.

Years later his daughter Sheila met an American serviceman, Lieutenant Colonel Lee LeBlanc. They fell in love and married in the UK, then moved to California.

Edith and her brother Brian remained in the UK and she was buried in the same graveyard as Albert after her death in 1085.

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In a strange twist of fate, an infectious diseases expert from the University of Glasgow discovered he had a connection to the family.

Michael Barrett, a Professor of Biochemical Parasitology, already had a long-standing interest in the story behind the first patient when his aunt casually remarked that she had been friends with Sheila as a young woman. The pair worked together in a bank in Newberry.

After a bit of online detective work Michael managed to track down her daughter Linda Willason.

“Sheila and her daughter are both artists and I found a little news story about them online," he said.

"I contacted the Redlands Arts Society and it just happened that Linda, Sheila’s daughter was manning the communications so she picked it up."

Sheila, now 90 and her daughter Linda will be guests of honour at a major event in Glasgow on July 3 telling the story of penicillin's discovery and exploring the threat anti-microbial resistance poses to modern medicine.

Much of pencillin's discovery is “wrapped up in the war” says Prof Barrett, including the real reason why the police officer became unwell.

“The rose story was quite famous but it turns out it wasn’t a cut on a rose bush that caused it," he says.

"During the Blitz, he had been seconded to Southampton and was injured in a bombing raid. It was a small cut above his lip that created his septicemia.

“An Oxford historian followed up the story to try to find out why the authorities created the rose bush story and he could only think that it was a propaganda thing.

“They didn’t want to say it was a successful German bombing raid that did it.”

Albert’s granddaughter says Prof Barrett was instrumental in getting the real story behind his illness out.

“Michael wrote a very very good article and straightened out the misconception that it was a rose thorn, which made my mother very happy," she said.

“She didn't ever speak about penicillin when I was young that I can remember but I know that they found out about it very late sometime in the sixties.

“Someone came to the door and asked for a photograph and told my grandmother and my mom and that's how they found out.”

Before they travel to Glasgow, Linda will take her mother to visit her father’s grave in Newberry and the site in the village of Wooten, near Oxford, where the family home once stood.

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“It will be very emotional," she said. "After the loss of my dad and everyone else that lives in England pretty much.

"She never really, really wanted to leave.

“My wish for my mother on this trip is that she gets to do everything that she wishes to do.

“My mother is an artist here in Redlands and coincidentally met another artist here that was actually in the exact same orphanage that mom was in, only a few years later.”

It was the Scottish doctor, Alexander Fleming, from Darvel, in East Ayshire, whose discoveries led to the antibiotic that became known as penicillin, while he was working at St Mary’s hospital in London in 1928. 

The story goes that he went on holiday and left the lid of his bacteriological plate and when he returned, fungus had landed on the plate and had killed all the bacteria in its proximity.

“He just wasn’t a good enough chemist to be able to purify it,” said Prof Barrett.

The coming of the Second World War saw interest in Fleming’s work rekindled by a group of brilliant scientists in Oxford including Howard Florey, an Australian Pathologist, who assembled a team that included a number of individuals with those skills in chemical purification that Fleming had lacked.  One, Ernst Chain, was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany

On the day that the evacuation of the beach in Dunkirk began the scientists conducted the first mouse experiments and found that the drug was able to cure them of bacterial infections.

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“What Florey and the others recognised was that more people died of bacterial infections than got killed by the bullets," said Prof Barrett.

“They realised that actually this was a potential wonder drug and if you could save their lives by treating them with penicillin you could have the answer to the war. So there’s this juxtaposed catastrophe happening in Dunkirk and what was happening in Oxford.”

Some believe that Fleming, who died in 1955, is given too much credit for the discovery but Prof Barrett is not among them.

“I think on balance Fleming is rightly credited because the fact is, he discovered it," he said.

“It wasn’t sheer fluke because Fleming had actually been looking for antibacterial agents since the First World War when he was a doctor in France and was traumatised by all the soldiers coming back and dying of battlefield wounds and gangrene.

“He discovered another one before penicillin. So it was serendipitous that the fungus landed on the plate but he knew what he was looking for and he was able to show that it was secreting something that was killing the bacteria.

“The Oxford group just had more of the skills to get there.”

On July 3, Glasgow will host the World Congress of Pharmacology, with Dame Sally Davis, England’s former Chief Medical Office among the speakers.

The event will examine the future of antiobiotics, amid concerns antimicrobial resistance could lead to the collapse of modern healthcare if action is not taken now.

“The issues are that we haven’t really invented any new classes of antibiotics for 30 years and some of the reasons are that we have picked all the low-hanging fruit," says Prof Barrett.

“The other issue is that it’s not of interest for pharmaceutical companies to make new antibiotics because you want to be able to take a short course and once you are cured you stop taking the drugs and we also want them to be as cheap as possible.

“That is the complete opposite of where the pharmaceutical industry wants to go now, where they want to produce things like statins that overweight, middle-aged men have to take for the rest of their lives.

“Antimicrobials are not profitable for the pharmaceutical industry so they have abandoned them.”

He said the UK has been piloting a scheme that Dame Sally refers to as the “Netflix model”.

“You pay the pharmaceutical industry to develop a new antibiotic and your preference would be that it never gets used but it is there if you need it," he said.

“If we reach a point where they become resistant to all the antibiotics we do have and there is nothing else we are truly in trouble.

“It is not just that you get a bacterial infection and die, the whole of modern medicine collapses."

He said the hip replacement he had himself would not be possible and childbirth would become dangerous again because of the risks of infection.

He said: “Sally Davies said antimicrobial resistance is the real existential pandemic. Covid 19 was a global problem but the antimicrobial resistance is worse.

“We do need to re-engage with the pharmaceutical industry and not waste the antibiotics that we have got.

“You assume everyone knows it but even the GPs have a propensity to give out more antibiotics than they should.”