London

Inspired by musicologists' use of fragmented scores to complete the unfinished works of great composers, a British researcher has pieced together Alexander Fleming's laboratory scribblings to recreate a paper that he says restores the reputation of the much-maligned discoverer of penicillin.

Fleming published details of the antibiotic effects of a mould that had killed off bacterial cultures in his poorly sterilized petri dishes, but never isolated penicillin from the mould or published work on its potential as a drug. Many of Fleming's contemporaries and biographers have accused him of being messy and lazy, and of losing interest in his chance 1928 discovery, even though he went on to take much of the credit for discovering the first antibiotic drug.

“I hope my version of this paper will once and for all scotch the idea that Fleming was some idle dilettante who did little to develop what is arguably the most important drug in medicine,” says Milton Wainwright, the University of Sheffield microbiologist who has written the paper that Fleming could have produced, but didn't (M. Wainwright Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, in the press).

The posthumous paper, which is based on Wainwright's studies of Fleming's lab notes and personal communications, describes the antibacterial properties of other airborne moulds. Wainwright emulated Fleming's writing style and prepared the paper in a format suitable for the now defunct British Journal of Experimental Pathology, where Fleming published his first work on penicillin.

Wainwright also argues that Fleming fully realized penicillin's potential prior to 1940. It was around this time that biochemists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at the University of Oxford first isolated penicillin and demonstrated its potential as a drug. Fleming perhaps delayed publication while he gathered data for a magnum opus on penicillin, argues Wainwright.

Composer and musicologist Anthony Payne, who has used the records kept by Edward Elgar to complete the British composer's Symphony No. 3, says that there are parallels between the two works — before the third symphony was performed, scholars regarded Elgar as an artist in decline. “My work proved that what people had been saying about him was completely wrong,” says Payne.