Five medical breakthroughs which came about by accident

It’s really quite frightening how many medical breakthroughs have come about purely by accident. Though scientists don’t like to talk about it, they owe a great deal to chance.

You pay the world’s most brilliant scientists millions of pounds to find a cure – only for the answer to come about with all the skill of picking the right lottery numbers.

It certainly makes you think.

I mean, for all I know, the disgusting coffee cup which has starting growing some sort of fungus on it because I haven’t washed it for a week could be the key to the next big medical breakthrough.

It’s that haphazard.

Well, DietPixie has compiled a list of some of the most astonishing.

Enjoy!

5. Penicillin
Thank God Dr Alexander Fleming was a cry baby.
Why? Well, because if not, it could have been years until we discovered penicillin - one of the most important breakthroughs in modern medicine.

Confused? Okay, well, a lot of people know Fleming found the penicillin by accident when his research into flu in 1928 was ruined by an unwelcome fungus growing in one of his petri dishes.

Obviously, the penicillium mold became far more important than the research he was doing anyway, but the only reason Fleming did not throw away the plate away was because of a similar mold he had found in one of his dishes six years earlier.

What caused the bacteria to form was apparently a teardrop Fleming had shed – possibly in frustration.

After conducting some tests on the spore, he found that tears contain an antibiotic-like enzymne that could stave off bacterial growth. Hence the reason why Fleming was not so eager to throw away the later sample in 1928.

Later he noted, “But for the previous experience, I would have thrown the plate away, as many bacteriologists have done before.”

And it’s just as well he didn’t.

4. Quinine
Used to treat malaria, quinine was discovered when a Peruvian native suffering from malarial fever unwittingly drank from a pool of water which had been contaminated by the bark of the cinchona tree, which only grows in certain parts of South America.

If he had realised that it had been contaminated, there is no way he would have drunk from it as the bark of the tree – known as quina-quina was thought to be poisonous.

But rather than make him worse, his fever miraculously broke. News soon spread of the miracle cure and it was not long before they were teaching missionaries how to extract the chemical from the bark.

3. Viagra
Just think how many marriages have been saved by the small blue pill, Viagra.

But the only reason millions of men with erection problems can get their hands on them is purely by accident.

Basically, pharmaceutical company Pfizer was trialling it as a drug designed to treat angina, but soon realised it had the rather more lucrative side effect of giving men raging hard-ons.

Let’s just say the angina trials were dumped pretty quickly.

2. X-rays
X-rays have become an essential tool in diagnosing medical ailments, but the man who came up with the idea was not even thinking about its possible medical uses.

In fact, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen was more interested in finding out whether he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard.

Okay, you might think this is a particularly boring thing to do, but research like this has led to the invention of TVs and fluorescent light bulbs.

Anyway, while doing this he noticed a glow had appeared in his darkened lab a few feet from the tube.

At first, he thought a tear in the cardboard had let light escape. But he soon realised it was actually rays of light passing right through the paper and appearing on a fluorescent screen a metre away.

He found this new ray – which he dubbed the X-ray – unlike cathode rays, could penetrate record the image of a human skeleton on a photographic negative. Eureka!

1. Epilepsy
Charles Lockock, like most physicians of the mid-19th century, believed epilepsy was caused by too much masturbating.

Now, bromides were known to curb sex drive, so the London MD thought it would therefore reduce the chances of having a fit.

It worked, but it had nothing to do with masturbation. Just think if he had thought the best way to stop men from masturbating was to cut their hands off. Chilling!

Source: Nova Online