Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer

(soft upbeats) Everybody has heard the name Alexander Fleming, he's somebody we all study at school. What he was fascinated by was the hidden micro world lies beyond our vision. He became obsessed with microbes bacteria and he studied them relentlessly. During the first world war Fleming had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. And in France, in the hospitals behind the Western front. He had seen at first hand the consequences of bacterial infection, septicemia gangrene. Of the millions of soldiers who died in world War One it's estimated that around a third were not killed by shell fire or machine guns but by disease. Fleming understood as well as anybody possibly could desperate urgent need for new treatments to combat bacterial infection. (soft music) London, 1928, Fleming is working in his lab. (soft music) (stamping feet) The story of Alexander Fleming gives hope to anyone with an untidy desk because his untidiness was actually critical to what happened. (soft music) In the summer of 1928 Fleming left a Petri dish contaminated with the bacteria staphylococcus on his desk uncovered. (soft music) He then went off on a vacation but he left one of the windows of his laboratory wide open. (stamping feet) (soft music) (door slumping) (soft music) A microscopic fungal spore is blown in through a window perhaps escaped from a downstairs laboratory, (soft music) pivoting and floating on a sea of turbulent air. It sinks down onto one of Fleming's uncovered Petri dishes. (upbeats) (murmurs) (train squealing) On the 3rd of September, 1928, Alexander Fleming returns to his laboratory and to his untidy desk. (soft music) This is the groundbreaking moment (soft music) because Fleming starts to look through all the Petri dishes he left on his desk (soft music) and something catches his eye. (soft music) On one of the dishes, He sees that the mold has grown and around the mold there was no staphylococcus activity. (soft music) What Fleming concludes is that the bacteria has been killed by something produced by the mold. So this naturally occurring mold, something that's literally in the air could be a bacteria killer. (soft music) This was a discovery of enormous significant (mumbles) that was eventually to win Alexander Fleming, the Nobel Prize. (upbeats) And I think a lot of people assume when they hear the Fleming story that after Fleming makes this accidental discovery within a couple of years penicillin is available as a medicine changing the world. But in fact, the development of the drug itself effectively gets paused for a decade after Fleming's accidental discovery. We so much want to believe in that sort of Hollywood story of accidental discovery, kind of addicted to the narrative. In Fleming's amazing guy we shouldn't take it away from him. He understood, he discovered something significant but he didn't have all the skills needed. He wasn't a chemist. He couldn't have taken things much further. And I think more importantly, he didn't have the network needed to transform an accident in a Petri dish, to the drug that changed the world. You need to have networks of people with different skills, different fields of expertise coming together to solve a problem. And in fact, that's exactly what happens in the history of penicillin.