Pat's Note: I was fascinated to see hat not only did Fleming foresee
the possibility of misuse of penicillin, but he too was a retired
shipping clerk with a modest unassuming disposition who mangled his
English.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article4691534.ece

September 7, 2008

Penicillin overuse puts Fleming's legacy at risk


....When he received the Nobel prize for medicine in 1945, with Howard
Florey and Ernest Chain, the scientists who worked on the development
of penicillin as a drug, Fleming told the audience: “The time may come
when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is
the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and, by
exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug, make them
resistant.”...

....Yet the former Kilmarnock Academy pupil, who began his working
life as a shipping clerk before attending St Mary’s medical school,
remained diffident and unassuming, even in the midst of the attention
that followed his discovery. “Penicillin brought him fame,” says Kevin
Brown, curator of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum at St
Mary’s. 

“Before, he was a fairly modest scientist — interesting, but a very
poor lecturer who didn’t shine in society because he was silent most
of the time. The students thought he was a bit of a joke because he
tended to mumble and they didn’t understand his lectures. 

“After penicillin, he blossomed into this great man, somebody
everybody wanted to meet.” 

But to maintain his legacy, others must keep following in his wake. "

Pat's further note: 

Another former shipping clerk was David Cameron. Apparently, he went
to Hong Kong for while.

Possibly he was attempting to qualify to be the Taipan of a Hong.
Taipans were normally of Scottish descent, once with a taste for opium
trading and had to have served as a "water clerk" (a subspecies of
shipping clerk on their way to being a shipbroker).

Whether he found the going too tough or the translation of " venomous
snake" put him off, we will probably never know.

I continue to be surprised that the Conservatives continue to miss
giving Britain's bent vets a boot up the bottom. One would expect more
from a fomer shipping clerk even if he did not make it to Taipan.

-- 
Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com  and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com/