The discovery of Viagra, a VERY happy accident!
ACCIDENTAL: THE GREATEST (UNINTENTIONAL) SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS & HOW THEY CHANGED THE WORLD
If THE microbiologist Alexander fleming had kept his laboratory clean, he might never have discovered penicillin. In August 1928, fleming went on holiday and left the place in a mess. Petri dishes were piled up in the sink. Returning, he found them covered with mould.
In one of the dishes, he saw that the mould had destroyed bacteria around it; perhaps it contained something lethal to bacteria.
On further investigation, fleming discovered that spores of the mould Penicillium rubrum had drifted in from another lab, settled in his dirty Petri dish and secreted an antibiotic. When fleming extracted the ‘mould juice’, the age of antibiotics had begun.
fleming’s story is one of many told entertainingly in Tim James’s book. As he says: ‘Some of the most important life-saving inventions and profound discoveries about the universe were only arrived at because something, somewhere went wrong.’
In 19th-century America, Samuel Goodyear was a man obsessed by the idea that rubber was a super-material of the future. The problem was that it begins to melt at around human body temperature and he needed a way to stop this.
He experimented by adding sulphur to the rubber. But while showing off a lump of it to his brother in his kitchen, he lost his grip on it. It flew across the room, landing on the stove.
The lump should have melted but it didn’t. Instead, it developed a ‘tough sheen similar to hardened leather’. Goodyear had accidentally discovered a method of creating durable rubber which he called ‘vulcanisation’. His name lives on in Goodyear Tyres.
Some accidental discoveries emerge from other people’s misfortunes. William Beaumont is remembered for his groundbreaking research into human digestion. He was only able to carry it out because another man — Canadian fur trader Alexis St Martin — was shot in the torso in 1822.
Beaumont saved his life and St Martin recovered. His body, however, reconstructed itself in a strange way, creating a fleshly tunnel from his stomach to under his left nipple. Beaumont, who kept St Martin a virtual prisoner for years, carried out experiments in which he lowered bits of food on string
by Tim James (Robinson £20, 224pp)
down his patient’s new orifice, enabling him to observe digestion in action.
Although they had beneficial results, Beaumont’s experiments were ethically indefensible. Even in the second half of the 20th century, scientists were conducting experiments that would not be allowed today.
In 1959, psychologist Milton Rokeach wondered what would happen if you introduced three mentally ill patients, all of whom believed they were Jesus Christ, to one another.
Would this be the means of curing them of their delusions? the answer was ‘No’. In fact, they began to argue furiously about who was the real Jesus.
only later did they all come to the conclusion that the other two were unwell and that the kindest thing to do was to humour them.
It’s remarkable how many scientific advances were the result of what James calls ‘spasms of serendipity’.
‘there are 92 naturally occurring elements in the periodic table,’ he points out, ‘and 68 were discovered by chance.’
Many familiar modern brands also owe their existence to chance. Super Glue was the result of a failed attempt to create a new plastic; Post-it notes were created after a similarly unsuccessful effort at inventing a glue.
In the early 1990s, Pfizer was testing a new drug it thought could be used to treat angina. While monitoring male participants in the trials, it became apparent the drug had a surprising side-effect on another organ of the body. It’s now marketed as Viagra.
In this engaging book, James provides an alternative history of scientific progress to the one with which we’re familiar. As he notes in his introduction: ‘Sometimes it’s not being in the right place at the right time which starts a revolution — it’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’