FLASHCARDS: So…Mistakes Happen

Gabrielle Birchak/ February 21, 2025/ Late Modern History, Modern History/ 0 comments

Wel­come to Math, Sci­ence, His­to­ry, where on Fri­day we post a short lit­tle flash card about some­thing mathy, sci­en­cy, or his­to­ry. I’m Gabrielle, and today, we’re talk­ing about mak­ing mis­takes and the good things that come out of them. Some­times, even among the best of them com­ma mis­takes are made peri­od and it takes a wise and hum­ble indi­vid­ual to sim­ply admit that they made a mis­take and they were wrong and then they moved on. And through the process of mov­ing on from that mis­take, greater things can be dis­cov­ered. So today’s flash card is about mis­takes, a messy sci­en­tist, and a for­got­ten petri dish.

Alexan­der Flem­ing was born in Scot­land in 1881 and grew up in a rur­al farm­ing fam­i­ly. He wasn’t from a wealthy back­ground, but he was nat­u­ral­ly curi­ous and excelled in school.

Flem­ing ini­tial­ly trained as a doc­tor and joined St. Mary’s Hos­pi­tal Med­ical School in Lon­don. Dur­ing World War I, he served in the Roy­al Army Med­ical Corps, where he saw first­hand how bac­te­r­i­al infec­tions killed more sol­diers than bul­lets. This expe­ri­ence shaped his desire to find some­thing that could fight infections.

After the war, Flem­ing became a bac­te­ri­ol­o­gist, study­ing how bac­te­ria caused dis­ease. He wasn’t a flashy sci­en­tist, and in fact, he was known for being a bit absent-mind­ed. His lab was noto­ri­ous­ly messy, a trait that, as you’ll soon see, played a cru­cial role in his discovery.

Fast-for­ward to Sep­tem­ber 1928. Flem­ing had been study­ing Staphy­lo­coc­cus bac­te­ria, which can cause nasty infec­tions. He had left petri dish­es con­tain­ing bac­te­ria on a work­bench in his clut­tered lab while he went on vaca­tion to Suf­folk with his family.

When he returned, he noticed some­thing strange on one of the dish­es. A mold had grown, like­ly from spores float­ing through the air. But here’s the inter­est­ing part: the bac­te­ria around the mold had been com­plete­ly destroyed. The rest of the dish was cov­ered in bac­te­r­i­al colonies, but near the mold, the bac­te­ria had disappeared.

Flem­ing took a clos­er look and iden­ti­fied the mold as Peni­cil­li­um nota­tum. He quick­ly real­ized that this mold was pro­duc­ing a sub­stance that could kill bac­te­ria. He named it penicillin.

Fleming’s curios­i­ty kicked into over­drive. He test­ed peni­cillin on dif­fer­ent types of bac­te­ria and found that it was par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive against harm­ful ones like Staphy­lo­coc­cus and Strep­to­coc­cus, which caused infec­tions like pneu­mo­nia, scar­let fever, and even blood poisoning.

But here’s the catch—Fleming couldn’t fig­ure out how to mass-pro­duce peni­cillin. The mold was dif­fi­cult to grow in large amounts, and extract­ing pure peni­cillin was a night­mare. He pub­lished his find­ings in 1929, but at the time, the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty large­ly ignored them.

Flem­ing con­tin­ued his work but ulti­mate­ly moved on. He saw penicillin’s poten­tial but didn’t have the tools or resources to turn it into a viable treat­ment. It would take anoth­er decade and a world war for peni­cillin to get the atten­tion it deserved.

Fast-for­ward to the ear­ly 1940s. With World War II rag­ing, bac­te­r­i­al infec­tions were killing sol­diers at an alarm­ing rate. This time, sci­en­tists in Oxford that includ­ed Howard Flo­rey, Ernst Chain, and their team, picked up where Flem­ing left off.

Using bet­ter meth­ods, they found a way to puri­fy and mass-pro­duce peni­cillin. The impact was imme­di­ate. Infec­tions that were once death sen­tences like pneu­mo­nia, syphilis, and infect­ed wounds, were now treatable.

By D‑Day in 1944, peni­cillin was being used on the bat­tle­field, sav­ing thou­sands of lives. It became known as the “won­der drug,” and its suc­cess led to the devel­op­ment of mod­ern antibiotics.

He wrote about this won­der drug, stat­ing, “One some­times finds what one is not look­ing for. When I woke up just after dawn on Sep­tem­ber 28, 1928, I cer­tain­ly did­n’t plan to rev­o­lu­tion­ize all med­i­cine by dis­cov­er­ing the world’s first antibi­ot­ic, or bac­te­ria killer. But I sup­pose that was exact­ly what I did.”

Flem­ing, Flo­rey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Med­i­cine for their work. Flem­ing, always mod­est, warned about the poten­tial for antibi­ot­ic resis­tance, which is a warn­ing that remains rel­e­vant today.

Peni­cillin opened the door to the antibi­ot­ic rev­o­lu­tion. Today, antibi­otics save mil­lions of lives every year. With­out them, sim­ple infec­tions could still be deadly.

But let’s take a moment to appre­ci­ate the les­son here: sci­ence isn’t always about care­ful plan­ning. Some­times, dis­cov­er­ies hap­pen by acci­dent, and the key is rec­og­niz­ing their impor­tance. Flem­ing could have ignored that petri dish, thrown it away, and moved on. Instead, he saw some­thing unusu­al and asked, “What if?”

So, what can we take away from Alexan­der Fleming’s sto­ry? First, sci­en­tif­ic break­throughs often come from unex­pect­ed places. Sec­ond, per­sis­tence is key—even when the world doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize a discovery’s importance.

And final­ly, a lit­tle messi­ness isn’t always a bad thing.

Thanks for join­ing me on this episode of Flash­cards! Until next time, carpe diem!