Accidental Discovery and Nobel Prize

Accidental Discovery and Nobel Prize

While our NTUMC68 classmates are offering their opinions on a
topic posted in our class website: "A Life Saved Twice", which is
a story about two families, the Fleming and Churchill, I recall I
have also posted an article "80 years ago, Moldy and Goody" last
year in regard to the discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming :


MOLDY BUT GOODY

In the new issue of Smithonian, there is another short note, "Moldy
but Goody" in the section of "This Month In History":

"Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returns to St. Mary
Hospital in London from a holiday on September 3, 1928, to find
mold growing on one of his staphylococcus cultures. Noting that no
staphylococci are growing near the mold, Fleming investigates. He
names the "mould juice" penicillin, for the penicillium mold that
produces it. Fleming publishes his discovery in 1929, but it will be
a decade before Oxford scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Boris
Chain isolate and purify it for use as an antibiotic. Fleming dies in
1955 at age 73."

A great scientist made the discovery and had saved myriad people's
lives ! He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1945
with Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

The story is rather similar to the "discovery" of "Australian Antigen"
by Baruch Blumberg.

Blumberg was a genetic scientist. In the early 1960s he was
examining blood samples from widely diverse populations in an
attempt to determine why the members of different ethnic and
national groups vary widely in their responses and susceptibility to
disease. In 1963 he discovered in the blood serum of an Australian
aborigine an antigen that he later (1967) determined to be part of a
virus that causes hepatitis B, which was not what he was originally
looking for.

He was the recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine for
"discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and
dissemination of infectious diseases", despite the fact that he
was not even a virologist or an infectious disease specialist.

Another thought.

The Fleming story could also be compared to the "Discovery of
America" by Christopher Columbus.

In order to find a short path to the orient, Columbus, in 1492, set
sail across the Atlantic Ocean in search of the East Indies. He
"accidentally discovered" the New World, America.

No Nobel Prize then though.

Yeh Tze