When scientists from New Zealand find that meningitis vaccine accidentally prevents gonorrhea, they take advantage of the unpredictable power responsible for some of the most astonishing discoveries in medicine: chance.
Most people have no idea how many things in the world are discovered entirely by chance.
The German writer, scholar, encyclopedist and discoverer Johann Wolfgang Goethe also recognizes the role of chance. "The discovery needs luck, inventiveness, intellect - none of them can without the other," he says.
Viagra
In the laboratories of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in Kent, unsuccessful treatment of angina accidentally turns into a super successful drug for erectile dysfunction costing billions of dollars.
During the early clinical trials of sildenafil, more commonly known as Viagra, male volunteers who receive pills continuously report unstoppable long-lasting erections.
After further studies, it appears that the product designed to relax the blood vessels around the heart to improve blood flow has the same effect on the arteries in the penis.
Since its release in 1998, the pill has been used to improve the sexual lives of millions of men worldwide.
Incidentally, the 2007 Nobel Prize for the Nobel Prize, a Nobel Prize parody awarded annually for the most useless trials of the year, was given to three Argentinian scientists who discovered that Viagra helped hamsters recover more quickly, Faster than the time difference.
Penicillin
Returning to work after a one-month vacation in Scotland in 1928, British biologist Alexander Fleming made a discovery in Petri dish, which he left without leaving open on the window sill in his laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital in London.
In the absence of Fleming, a place where a staphylococcal bacterium was grown catches a mold. The scientist notices that where it is moldy, the bacteria have disappeared.
He correctly comes to the conclusion that the mold produces some substance that destroys staphylococcal bacteria. Fleming has long been able to prove that this substance stops the development of many other harmful bacteria.
The substance, called penicillin, appears to be completely harmless to humans and animals. This is actually the first antibiotic.
His accidental discovery was borne by the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945, along with Oxford's Flori and Chene, who perfected the mass production of penicillin to treat the wounded in battlefields during the Second World War.
"When I awoke shortly after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly did not intend to revolutionize medicine, discovering the world's first antibiotic or killer of bacteria. But I guess I did just that, "Fleming said later.
Cardiac pacemaker
New York engineer Wilson Greatbatch opens the world's first cardiac pacemaker to be implanted. But he does it without asking.
While trying to create a heart rate recorder in 1956, he accidentally puts the wrong type of resistor in the prototype, which immediately began to emit regular electrical impulses.
Recognizing that these impulses repeat the action of the normal heartbeat, Greetchach instantly realizes the potential of his device. After 2 years of improvement, his pacemaker design, which can be implanted in the heart, was patented in 1960 and soon began to be produced.
Modern developments on this device annually improve the lives of more than half a million patients with slow heart rhythm.
Stomach ulcers
In the 1980s, two Australian doctors became ridiculed by their claim that stomach ulcers were not the result of business lunches and stress, but of the most common bacterial infection.
Gastroenterologist Barry Marshall and his colleague, Pathologist Robin Warren, note that all stomach samples taken from their patients with an ulcer contain the same spiral bacterium.
To prove his claim, Marshall tried a sample of the bacterium taken from a patient with an ulcer. Within a week, it gets strong stomach inflammation, which is subsequently completely cured after taking appropriate antibiotics.
The discovery of the two scientists also leads to the destruction of a variety of stomach cancer caused by the same bacterial infection.
For discovery and labor, Australian scientists have been awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Antidepressants
Several types of antidepressants also owe their discovery of chance. From iproniazid, which was originally used to treat tuberculosis in the 1950s, to tricyclics in the 1960s created during the experimental treatment of schizophrenia. The most recent breakthrough involves the use of ketamine.
Valium
The original benzodiazepine was developed by the Polish emigrant Leo Sternbach in the United States in the 1950s, from chemical compounds thrown away, which he synthesized 20 years earlier in Poland while working on the creation of new paints.
Doses are a complete failure, but benzodiazepines are rapidly becoming the most popular prescription medication in the United States.
Thank you for reading it - SuggeElson
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