“Necessity is not always the mother of invention; sometimes it’s happenstance that begets the most amazing discoveries.” As said by Jesse Lane in her article “Not-So-Dumb Luck. One of the best discoveries in the medical field was unveiled by accident. Also, the medicine penicillin had an interesting development and a staggering result. This is how the antibiotic penicillin came to be, and what it is now. Alexander Fleming is credited with the discovery of penicillin. When Alexander went on an extended vacation for about a month long, he left his laboratory messier than a large percentage of people would. When he came back, he found all of his dishes were slathered in mold and other fungi. At first, he thought it was an annoyance, but as he quickly glanced at each dish he realized that one of them looked like it had been made of a different kind of fungi. Later examined by other chemists and biologists, they made the conclusion this tray contained a staphylococci bacteria. Jesse Lane also states that “Fleming’s discovery was born from sheer luck.” This means that if Alexander hadn’t left his dishes out, the antibiotic penicillin may not have been discovered for decades. In the article “The History of …show more content…
When investigating the origin of this mold they discovered that the dish of mold they brought to the U.S. came from a cantaloupe. In November of 1941, “Andrew J. Moyer, the lab’s expert on the nutrition f molds, had succeeded; he was able to find a way to increase the yield of the penicillin to ten times the normal amount. The scientists then shared their findings and the price of the drug sky-rocketed to about twenty dollars for one small dose of the antibiotic. But as time went on, production of penicillin kept on and the price was drastically