The Mother of Invention

In 1928, after a much-needed holiday, Alexander Fleming whilst speaking to a colleague at St Mary’s Hospital on Praed Street in London, noticed an area on an agar plate where an invading fungus stopped bacteria growing. This famous moment was the discovery of penicillin. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has often quipped that after a ‘night out’ on Praed Street, penicillin might be just what is needed! There are a vast number of steps between a scientific discovery and a tool or drug that can be used ‘after a night out’. In the case of penicillin, it was the work of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain of the University of Oxford, who first isolated penicillin and tested it on mice and an Oxfordshire Constabulary policeman. Unfortunately for the latter they only had enough purified penicillin to keep him alive for a few weeks. This was 1939 and the start of WWII. Fleming became famous for the discovery of penicillin and with Chain and Florey were awarded the Nobel Prize for in Medicine and Physiology in 1945. The names Chain and Florey have been lost in popular history. Florey never spoke to the press and indeed banned his Oxford team from doing the same – a lesson that the modern University has not forgotten.

Invention and turning an idea or discovery into a tool or product is a hallmark of humanity. WWII drove invention. By 1943, following Florey and Heatley’s secret transportation of penicillin fungus to the US soaked into their coats, the US pharmaceutical industry were producing enough pure penicillin to satisfy the needs of the whole allied forces. This was less than two years after Florey and Heatley had arrived in the US. Under the pressure of wartime needs the pharmaceutical industry found new ways to ferment and purify penicillin on a huge scale, saving countless lives in the remaining war years and in the years that followed. The parallels with the discovery and scaled-up manufacturing a Covid-19 vaccine are, of course, obvious. The ‘war-like’ state of nations, the unpredictability of the ‘enemy’, the need for an exit and the dual fears of illness and a failing economy. An effective vaccine that can be used world-wide is the only real way to exit the COVID19 crisis and Imperial and Oxford Universities lead the way in the UK. Like the dozens of other universities, institutes and companies around the world searching for a vaccine, the teams at Imperial and Oxford are hoping for that ‘Fleming moment’. We all watch and wait and hope.

The UK media of course join with us in this hope of an effective vaccine (soon), but because of too narrow a focus on only two UK universities they miss the other global efforts to create a vaccine. We want a vaccine for our vulnerable, our frontline staff, our family and our friends. But so does every other nation in the world. If the vaccine becomes available in the UK first, who gets it? It seems obvious - the vulnerable, frontline staff and our families. But are our families, here in the UK, more important than the frontline staff in Italy or the USA? Are our friends a greater priority than the vulnerable of France? These are questions that need not arise, because, like Florey taking the penicillin fungus to the USA in WWII, a vaccine for the world will only come through a joined up global endeavour. This we must actively promote and support. It’s time for the UK media to lift up its eyes from the easy, and lazy, ‘gotcha’ stories of COVID19 and take the time to think and project the bigger picture. After all this is not a UK epidemic but a global pandemic, of modern proportions.

It was not so long ago that the vast majority had never heard of Zoom or Teams, (or House Party), but today we have adopted, and adapted to, remote working to an extent without precedent. The technology to support this form of working is relatively new and we have taken it up on a massive scale because we must in order to work and socialise. It is the adoption of new technologies, rapidly and on a massive scale that will not only bring us beyond this first stage of COVID19 but also shape our futures. We will invent and adopt those inventions like no time in history. We will invent technologies for mass COVID19 testing with millions, then billions, of us using these tests weekly. We will invent a vaccine for COVID19 that will be tested, manufactured on a global scale and used for the vast majority of the world’s 7.8 billion people, all in one year. In the past few weeks, workers in the NHS have invented and adopted new practices at a rate that could only have been dreamed of by transforming the behaviour and reaction speeds of politicians and managers. Our invention and our adoption of these inventions will occur on an unprecedented scale, because we must, because this is ‘war’, a war in which Bill Gates recently commented, “we are all on the same side”. The consequences of COVID19 will for many thousands be the tragedy of lost friends and family, for many thousands more the loss of income and a way of life and for more again the long-term financial consequences of the essential government financial support and broken economies. But, out of this mother pandemic will be born invention, not only of viral tests and vaccines, but of new technologies to support new ways of living and new ways of working. New ways, that if we choose to adopt them, will address climate change, will protect other species, will therefore stimulate new markets in new industries and will bring balance to our work-lives (that enable us to retain some of the joys of the ‘lock-down time’ with families). It might not be that a single observation by a single scientist changes the way we choose to live, but through collective invention and rapid adoption, we can extract meaningful, and long lasting, benefits from this thoroughly modern disease.