Water for Health, for Healing, for Life

Sir Alexander Fleming was Nobel laureate recognized to have discovered penicillin. He was a Scottish scientist who worked at the Wright-Fleming Institute of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School of London University when I was a medical student there in 1950s. Many medical students had an emotional urge to become discoverers. I was no exception. Since childhood, I had been driven to study medicine and become someone who could positively affect the lives of people who fell sick.

In the introductory bacteriology course, students were divided into small groups and assigned to different tutors. Luck placed me in the tutorial group assigned to Sir Alexander. He was a refined and humble man. At the end of the tutorial, I gathered enough courage to ask him a question, the answer to which has deeply influenced me ever since.

I asked him, "Sir Alexander, is there a special way to become a discoverer in medicine?" He looked at me and pondered my naive question. After a pause, in a very refined Scottish brogue he replied, "Need and purpose." He explained that with the increasing introduction of different treatment procedures into medical practice, there was an ever-increasing rate of fatal bacterial complications. To find an agent that would stop bacterial infections in the human body became a most urgent need that established a purpose and resolve for those in bacterial research. "Need" was the mother of penicillin's discovery, and "purpose" the impetus of its development of human application.

F. Batmanghelidj, M.D. - Water for Health, for Healing , for Life