does anyone know how the discovery of Penicillin was accidental?

Question

or the x-ray?

plz explain

Answer 1

The discovery of penicillin is usually attributed to Scottish scientist Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928, though others had earlier noted the antibacterial effects of Penicillium

Fleming, at his laboratory in St. Mary's Hospital (now one of Imperial College's teaching hospitals) in London, noticed a halo of inhibition of bacterial growth around a contaminant blue-green mold Staphylococcus plate culture. Fleming concluded that the mold was releasing a substance that was inhibiting bacterial growth and lysing the bacteria. He grew a pure culture of the mold and discovered that it was a Penicillium mold, now known to be Penicillium notatum. Fleming coined the term "penicillin" to describe the filtrate of a broth culture of the Penicillium mold.

Röntgen was working on a primitive cathode ray generator that was projected through a glass vacuum tube. Suddenly he noticed a faint green light against the wall. The odd thing he had noticed, was that the light from the cathode ray generator was traveling through a bunch of the materials in its way (paper, wood, and books). He then started to put various objects in front of the generator, and as he was doing this, he noticed that the outline of the bones from his hand were displayed on the wall. Röntgen said he did not know what to think and kept experimenting. Two months after his initial discovery, he published his paper translated "On a New Kind of Radiation" and gave a demonstration in 1896.

Rontgen discovered its medical use when he a saw picture of his wife's hand on a photographic plate formed due to X-rays. His wife's hand's photograph was the first ever photograph of a human body part using X-rays.

Answer 2

Penicillin of Penicillin was accidental in the sense that it was not purposely experimented. It just happened after Sir Alexander Fleming got curious that there was a haloed area around the mold in his plate culture. He then concluded that such molds could be releasing a substance that inhibits the bacterial growth and destroying the bacteria. He cultivated a pure culture of that mold and found that it was a Penicillin mold - the source of the penicillin used as antibiotics. That's how penicillin was discovered.

As with the X-ray, it was also discovered (we can say accidentally) arising from what Physicist Johann Hittorf had observed in tubes with energy rays extending from a negative electrode. These rays produced a fluorescence when they hit the glass walls of the tubes. Curiosity started on there which resulted to series of researches and investigations by different scientists.

Answer 3

How Discovered: Fleming, a young British bacteriologist, was working on diseases caused by bacteria. One day in 1922 he happened to have a cold, and a drip from his nose fell into a dish containing a culture of bacteria. Fleming was annoyed that one of his carefully prepared cultures had been ruined. But he was surprised to find that the accidental drip of mucus from his nose had killed off any bacteria it had come in contact with. Fleming isolated the active agent in the mucus. But this agent proved too weak against the main disease-carrying bacilli.


However, chance favored Fleming yet again--six year later. Contamination from the air "ruined" one of the colonies of staphylococci he was growing, and a mold grew over the bacteria. But where the mold was, there were no staphylococci at all; they had been killed by the wonder drug penicillin. But chance had a big hand in this discovery. If the contaminating spore had not belonged to the rare mold Penicillium notatum and had the culture not been that of a staphylococcus, vulnerable to the antibacterial substance that this mold produces, we might still be awaiting the miracle drug.

Answer 4

The "accident" was that the experimenters were doing something else and didn't expect what they saw.

With penicillan, the experimenters were preparing sterile plate culture colonies. In this procedure, outside air is excluded. By some quirk of fate, some plates were exposed to outside air, and organisms from that air destroyed the colonies.
Analysis of the plates lead to identification of the mold, and the experimenters grasped the significance of their discovery.

X-Rays were discovered by accident by workers handling the uranium ore pitchblende. Somehow, the workers hands were overlain by photographic film, and the rays from the uranium in the pitchblende passed through the hand to produce a "picture" of the bones in the hand. Since the type of energy wave that did this was not known at that time (or that an energy wave could do this), it was called an X-Ray.