Laikam zinātniekiem vienkārši ir jābūt ļoti, ļoti vērīgiem.

Manā uztverē, vēl svarīgāk ir spēt no tiem pamanītajiem sīkumiem izdomāt kopīgo ainu un izdomāt kā šo savu pieņēmumu pārbaudīt.

Jo vienkārši pamanīts fakts - pie pelējuma bakčas neaug, pie penicilīna gluži neved.

Nav tik vienkārši ar to Flemingu
"Although Fleming recognized that penicillin might possibly have
a therapeutic use, he was far too interested in the production of
vaccines to waste much time exploring the possibility. A few discouraging
findings, and he dropped all work on it. He was also quite
uninterested in the problem of how to produce purer, stronger samples
of his new drug.
[..] The story I have just told is now a familiar one. It was Florey and
Chain, not Fleming, who demonstrated the clinical value of penicillin,
and they and their associates who began to solve the problems of
producing penicillin on an industrial scale. But their key experiment
of May 1940 could have been carried out by Fleming, who certainly
had, particularly as a result of the unappreciated work of Ridley and
Craddock, an adequate supply of penicillin to inject into mice. Had
he done this experiment in 1929 literally millions of lives could have been saved, lives that were lost without an adequate broad-spectrum
antibiotic.
[...]
The situation would thus appear straightforward: Fleming
discovered penicillin; Florey and Chain first put it to effective use.
The question of the relative contribution of Fleming on the one
hand, and Florey and Chain on the other to the revolution represented
by modern drug therapy has however distracted attention
from an even more puzzling and difficult question. In what sense can
Fleming be said to have discovered penicillin?"

avots http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780199212798/Bad-Medicine

Nu par dāmu Rozalindu Franklinu arī tik daudz nerunā kā par Vatsonu un Kriku.
Man šķiet, daudzviet ir grūti nošķirt, kura ieguldījums ir svarīgāks. Kā piemēram, šajā gadījumā - vīriņam ,kurš atklāja vielu vai arī vīriņiem, pateicoties kuru pūlēm penicilīns ieguva reālu pielietojumu. Abi ir visnotaļ svarīgi.

Man ir klusa aizdoma, ka vīriņiem, kas kaut ko atklāj un vīriņiem, kas izdomā plašu pielietojumu, domāšana darbojas atšķirīgi. Tāpēc jau vajag tos zinātnes/biznesa inkubatorus. Jāliek šādi vīriņi un dāmītes kopā.

Nav pat tik vienkārši.
"Thus it would seem
fair to say that Lister and Duchesne had both independently discovered
penicillin, and had taken it somewhat further than Fleming
did, and that there was nothing remarkable in Fleming’s initial
identification of penicillium as an antibiotic."

Dikti daudz uzvārdu... Flemingam ir Stāsts, varbūt tādēļ viņš ir vispopulārākais.

TE būs pilnīgāks stāsts
"Contamination of bacterial cultures by moulds takes place all the
time. In 1871 Sir John Burdon Sanderson reported that moulds of the
Penicillium group would prevent the development of bacteria in a
broth exposed to the air. In 1872 Joseph Lister established that the
growth of Penicillium glaucum would kill off bacteria in a liquid
culture. He at once saw the possible clinical application of the phenomenon.
He wrote to his brother saying ‘Should a suitable case
present, I shall endeavour to employ Penicillium glaucum and observe if
the growth of the organisms be inhibited in the human tissues.’ He
never published his results, so we do not know how far and how long
he pursued the question, but we do know that in 1884 a patient of
Lister’s, a young nurse, was suffering from an infected wound. Various
chemical antiseptics were tried without success, and then a new substance
was used. She was so astonished and so grateful at her seemingly
miraculous cure that she asked Lister’s registrar to write the
name of this substance in her scrap-book. It was penicillium. Why did
Lister keep this success to himself? There is, I think, only one possible
explanation. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s he was struggling to
win acceptance for the principle of antiseptic surgery. He lacked the
energy or the resources to embark on a new campaign while the
germ theory itself remained so widely contested.
In 1895 Vincenzo Tiberio in Naples injected extracts of penicillium moulds into infected animals, the experiment ‘first’ performed by
Florey and Chain in 1940, though his results were nothing like as
striking as theirs. In 1897, a young French army doctor called Duchesne
described similar experiments in a thesis. His preliminary results
were certainly striking; unfortunately he died of tuberculosis before
he could carry out further trials. Fleming was blissfully ignorant of all
this previous work. Had he known of it he might have been less quick
to claim the credit for the discovery of a new substance."

Stāsti tur ir visiem. Vēl arī jāpiemin, ka stāsti parasti rodas pēc tam (kā ar Ņūtona ābolu) Cik sapratu, Flemins arī nebija īsti ieinteresēts jautājumā par to, kas ar to penicilīnu ir darāms. Viņa prāts bija aizņemts ar vakcīnām.
"Although Fleming recognized that penicillin might possibly have
a therapeutic use, he was far too interested in the production of
vaccines to waste much time exploring the possibility. A few discouraging
findings, and he dropped all work on it. He was also quite
uninterested in the problem of how to produce purer, stronger samples
of his new drug. Two students of his, Ridley and Craddock, did
astonishingly able work, under horribly primitive conditions..."