ALL GENIUS OPENS BY ACCIDENT?

Let us try to reconstruct the chain of almost incredible accidents and coincidences that preceded the great discovery. The root cause was, oddly enough, the slovenliness of A. Fleming. Absent-mindedness is common to many scientists, but it does not always lead to such positive results. So, A. Fleming did not clean the cups from under the studied cultures for several weeks, as a result, his workplace was littered with fifty cups. However, during the cleaning process, he carefully examined each Cup for fear of missing something important. I didn’t miss it. One day, he found a fluffy mold in one of the cups, which suppressed the growth of a culture of staphylococci sown in this Cup. It looked like this: the chains of staphylococci around the mold had disappeared, and in place of the yellow muddy mass there were drops that looked like dew. After removing the mold, A. Fleming saw that ” the broth on which the mold has grown, has acquired a distinct ability to suppress the growth of microorganisms, as well as bactericidal and bacteriological properties in relation to many common pathogenic bacteria.” Apparently, mold spores were brought in through a window from a lab where mold samples taken from the homes of patients suffering from asthma were cultured to produce desensitizing extracts. The scientist left the Cup on the table and went to rest. The London weather has played a role: the cold is conducive to the growth of mold and the resulting warming is the growth of bacteria. If a single event had fallen out of the chain of random coincidences, who knows when mankind would have found out about penicillin. The mold that infected the Staphylococcus culture belonged to a rather rare species of the genus Penicillium-P. notatum, which was first found on rotted hyssop (a semi-shrub plant containing essential oil and used as a spice); interestingly, we find in the Bible an incredibly accurate indication of the properties of this plant. Here is a fragment of Psalm 50, which, by the way, remembered and a. Fleming: “Sprinkle me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.” First mention of antibacterial therapy?