How the First Wonder Drug Was Discovered
Story #14 of my 5,000-story project
“One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.“— Alexander Fleming
In 1928, Scottish physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming left for a two-week vacation. Before his trip, he left a stack of Petri dishes for a bacteria study in his hospital lab in London.
When Fleming returned, he realized he had placed the dishes on a bench instead of inside an incubator as intended.
Mold grew and ruined the dishes.
Amid the mess, he noticed something unusual. The bacteria around the fungus were destroyed, but the bacteria further away from the mold survived.
It clicked in his head: The mold had stopped the bacteria from spreading.
He studied further. The mold turned out to have come from the room beneath Fleming's lab. The fungus contained an antibacterial substance.
Fleming published his finding on the mold the year after his vacation. At first, it didn't catch the medical community's attention, but Fleming continued his work.
A decade later in 1940, Fleming and his colleagues at Oxford announced a life-changing discovery: the first antibiotic. Its name? Penicillin.
How would medicine have turned out if Fleming did not pay attention in the first place? He could have become angry and thrown the unsalvageable dishes straight into the trash.
But he chose to look, and he kept digging. His mistake turned out to be an opportunity of a lifetime.
