Sir Alexander Fleming and

the Scientific Method

On a farm in Scotland on August 6, 1881, an amazing person was born – Alexander Fleming.

As a boy he roamed the countryside with his 8 siblings who lived with him in a desolate area of Scotland.

The Fleming children had a love for the flora, fauna and merry weather that surrounded their farm for miles.

"We unconsciously learned a great deal from nature," he said at a later time in his life.

After his father passed away, Alec, who was 14, and 4 siblings moved to London. The eldest brother took over the Fleming's family farm.

In 1900 war broke out and 3 of the Fleming boys, including Alec, went to war in South Africa.

After the war, Fleming won a scholarship to St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. He went on and passed exams and completed his medical training at the Royal College of Surgeons in England. He studied hard!

Fleming’s specialty was diseases caused by bacteria.

In some of his experiments, he discovered that tears and nasal mucous could kill bacteria.

Fleming was brilliant, but not so tidy.One day, he was busy and didn’t have time to

clean up the lab. He left several petri dishes that were cultured with Staphlococcus bacteria on the edge of the counter.

When he came back to the lab two weeks later, he made an amazing discovery – green mold was growing on one of the petri dishes. Even though the entire petri dish was COVERED with bacteria, there was a halo around the mold.

Based on this observation, and what he already knew about growing bacteria on petri dishes, what inference do you think he made?

Fleming was a great research scientist, so of course he followed the scientific method to try to repeat these results.

What do you think he did? What would you do?

Alexander Fleming’s hypothesis was supported – the mold killed the bacteria in every trial.

He later named the substance in the mold “penicillin”

His discovery was an “accident” but it saved thousands of lives during World War II

Fleming was knighted in 1944, and died in 1955

He was named as one of the Time Magazine most influential people of the 20th century.

He was buried with other “nobles” of Great Britan

Working with your group, place your statement strips in the order that they would have occurred in Fleming’s lab.

In your notebook, print the letter from each strip in a vertical column

The hands-on part…

Next to the letters, write the names of the steps of the scientific method which they represent:

procedurematerialsbeginning observationsquestiondatahypothesistitle of experimentgraph of data and explanation of resultsclaimtitle of experiment