You know the saying about ‘tidy desk, tidy mind’? Well a bit of clutter never did Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and botanist Sir Alexander Fleming any harm. In fact, scientific sloppiness was partly responsible for one of the milestones in 20th century pharmaceutical history.
No one knows if he made a habit of it, but when Professor of Bacteriology Fleming headed off on holiday in the summer of 1928, he left his laboratory in the basement of St Mary’s Hospital in London in something of a state.
Returning to work on September 3rd, he began the grizzly task of clearing up his mess, sorting through a pile of dirty Petri dishes to see which could be salvaged. Until something caught his eye and sparked that famously inquisitive mind!
Gracing one of the petri dishes in which he’d been studying colonies of staphylococcus – a nasty bacteria responsible for boils, cellulitis and abscesses among other delights – was a blue green mould. Oozing from its edges, creating a halo effect around the blob and seemingly stopping the staph bacteria in its tracks, was a ‘mould juice’.
Although it would be more than a decade before it was used to treat infections, Fleming (soon to be a Nobel Laureate) had discovered penicillin. One of the original ‘wonder drugs’, penicillin is still one of the most widely used antibiotics today, nearly 90 years after its discovery.
Surveying the piles of paperwork on our Technical Analysts’ desks, maybe we should call time on Jumpstart’s clean desk policy.
