Sir Alexander Fleming Finds His Giftings

Alex Fleming was a solid young farm boy from Lochfield farm in Ayrshire, Scotland. Bright enough, at around thirteen he won a two year scholarship to the local academy, then moved to London for further education, eventually settling into the tedium of entering numbers as a shipping clerk.

By age twenty he’d really had enough of rows of numbers. When an uncle died and left him some money, Alex listened to the advice of his older brother, an occulist, and went to medical school, with plans to enter surgery. Unsurprisingly, he graduated at the top of his class, the life of a surgeon ahead of him.

As it happened, the young Fleming had joined the rifle club at the university, and showed himself good enough that the captain wanted to keep him at the university as long as possible. The captain lined Fleming up for a job in the medical lab, as assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy and immunology.

Fleming was exactly where he wanted to be, at the centre of his Giftings. His deep curiosity, his attention to detail, but mostly a kind of capacity for seeing intriguing oddities in the serendipitous, led him from one medical discovery to the next. It was the unpredicted destruction of staphylococcus in an inadvertently mold-contaminated petri dish that got him wondering what was going on, ultimately discovering penicillin.

Unlike much data-driven modern research, this one was in some ways, “out of the blue”. Fleming said, “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”

The discovery lab was rather nondescript, Fleming’s medical and scientific training were run of the mill, procedures in the lab were standard, and the introduction of a few spores of mold completely random. A thousand researchers would have noticed the mold and tossed the petri dish, annoyed.

But not Fleming. Fleming’s Giftings led him to look at the dish and say, “That’s funny.” (Not ha-ha funny, but “odd” funny.) It wasn’t the presence of the mold, but the peculiar action it was having on the culture, destroying the bacteria around it.

Penicillin was actually Fleming’s second critical discovery (lysozyme being the first), but not the last. His watchful eye and farm-boy’s curiosity continued to add to medicine’s arsenal until his death in 1955.

Alex Fleming could have spent his life totalling columns in the shipping office, perhaps even rising to some supervisory position. He could even have followed his brother in medicine, fixing the broken and even saving a life here and there. But he allowed himself to follow his Gifitngs of curiosity and deep observation and deduction into the lab, allowing his subconscious to nudge him about inconsistencies and oddities.

And, you and your Giftings?