Alexander Fleming Robert Hooke

Alexander Fleming Sir Alexander Fleming (6 August, 1881 11 March, 1955) was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist.
. He wrote many articles on bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy. His best-known discoveries are the discovery of the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the antibiotic substance penicillin from the mold Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.[1] In 1999, Time Magazine named Fleming one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his discovery[2] of penicillin, and stated: It was a discovery that would change the course of history. The active ingredient in that mould, which Fleming named penicillin, turned out to be an infection-fighting agent of enormous potency. When it was finally recognised for what it was, the most efficacious life-saving drug in the world, penicillin would alter forever the treatment of bacterial infections. By the middle of the century, Fleming's discovery had spawned a huge pharmaceutical industry, churning out synthetic penicillins that would conquer some of mankind's most ancient scourges, including syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis.[3] Early life Fleming was born on 6 August 1881 at Lochfield, a farm near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the third of the four children of Hugh Fleming (18161888) from his second marriage to Grace Stirling Morton (18481928), the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. Hugh Fleming had four surviving children from his first marriage. He was 59 at the time of his second marriage, and died when Alexander (known as Alec) was seven. Fleming went to Louden Moor School and Darvel School, and though the two before were modest schools at best, earned a two-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London where he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution.[4] After working in a shipping office for four years, the twenty-year-old Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming. His elder brother, Tom, was already a physician and suggested to his younger sibling that he follow the same career, and so in 1903, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London. He qualified for the school with distinction in 1906 and had the option of becoming a surgeon.
By chance, however, he had been a member of the rifle club (he had been an active member of the Volunteer Force since 1900). The captain of the club, wishing to retain Fleming in the team suggested that he join the research department at St Mary's, where he became assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy and immunology. He gained an M.B. and then a B.Sc. with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary's until 1914. On 23 December 1915, Fleming married a trained nurse, Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, County Mayo, Ireland. Fleming served throughout World War I as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and was Mentioned in Dispatches. He and many of his colleagues worked in battlefield hospitals at the Western Front in France. In 1918 he returned to St. Mary's Hospital, which was a teaching hospital. He was elected Professor of Bacteriology in 1928. Robert Hooke Robert Hooke FRS (18 July 1635 3 March 1703) was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath who played an important role in the scientific revolution, through both experimental and theoretical work. His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a brilliant scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666 (section:Hooke the architect), but eventually becoming ill and party to jealous intellectual disputes. These issues may have contributed to his relative historical obscurity (section: Personality and disputes). Hooke is known for his law of elasticity (Hooke's law), his book, Micrographia, and for first applying the word "cell" to describe the basic unit of life. Even now there is much less written about him than might be expected from the sheer industry of his life: he was at one time simultaneously the curator of experiments of the Royal Society and a member of its council, Gresham Professor of Geometry and a Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire of London, in which capacity he appears to have performed more than half of all the surveys after the fire. He was also an important architect of his time, though few of his buildings now survive and some of those are generally misattributed, and was instrumental in devising a set of planning controls for London whose influence remains today. Allan Chapman has characterised him as "England's Leonardo".[1]
Hooke studied at Wadham College during the Protectorate where he became one of a tightly-knit group of ardent Royalists centred around John Wilkins. Here he was employed as an assistant to Thomas Willis and to Robert Boyle, for whom he built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's gas law experiments. He built some of the earliest Gregorian telescopes, observed the rotations of Mars and Jupiter, and, based on his observations of fossils, was an early proponent of biological evolution.[2][3] He investigated the phenomenon of refraction, deducing the wave theory of light, and was the first to suggest that matter expands when heated and that air is made of small particles separated by relatively large distances. He performed pioneering work in the field of surveying and map-making and was involved in the work that led to the first modern plan-form map, though his plan for London on a grid system was rejected in favour of rebuilding along the existing routes. He also came near to deducing that gravity follows an inverse square law, and that such a relation governs the motions of the planets, an idea which was subsequently developed by Newton.[4] Much of Hooke's scientific work was conducted in his capacity as curator of experiments of the Royal Society, a post he held from 1662, or as part of the household of Robert Boyle. Life and works Much of what is known of Hooke's early life comes from an autobiography that he commenced in 1696, but was not completed. This was referenced by Richard Waller in his introduction to the The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M.D. S.R.S., printed in 1705. The work of Waller, along with John Ward's Lives of the Gresham Professors and John Aubrey's Brief Lives, form the major near-contemporaneous biographical accounts of Hooke.

Alexander Fleming Robert Hooke

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Alexander Fleming Sir Alexander Fleming (6 August, 1881 11 March, 1955) was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist.

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