Abundance

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin. After leaving a petri dish open to the air, Fleming found a strange substance had blown onto the dish and killed most of the bacteria he was studying. He identified the substance as penicillium, from which he was able to produce penicillin. This was a crucial discovery, as countless lives were lost to bacterial infections in the early-mid 20th century. In 1939, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up where Fleming left off and sought to see if penicillin could kill bacteria in animals like it did in Fleming’s petri dish. It seemed to work, as the mice infected with bacteria survived more often when treated with penicillin. However, when Florey and Chain experimented with human subjects in 1941, treating five patients with penicillin, two of them died. Klein and Thompson pause to illustrate the importance of recognizing more than the lightning-rod eureka moments of science. The discovery of penicillin in 1923 was groundbreaking, but by 1941, two people were dead, and penicillin had accomplished nearly nothing.

The Eureka Myth

The birth of new and exciting ideas should be celebrated, but Klein and Thompson assert that “progress is more about implementation than invention” (171).