From Alzheimer’s to Zebrafish: Eclectic Science and Regulatory Stories 70
The words luck and serendipity are frequently used interchangeably to describe the
evolution of many scientific discoveries. There are nuances of difference, however. Luck
is an English word derived from the Middle High German gelűcke, which means both
happiness and good fortune—conditions that are not necessarily identical.1 The word ser-
endipity was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 it describes discoveries made by accident
and sagacity. Sagacity, defined as penetrating intelligence, keen perception and sound
judgment, is essential for serendipity. Walpole used serendipity to describe some of his
own accidental discoveries, but it did not appear in major dictionaries until 1974.2 Since
then, serendipity has been used with increasing frequency, and luck much less often, to
describe medical breakthroughs and drug discoveries. Good fortune, however, is more apt
to occur when a well-trained scientist or clinician is unbounded by traditional theory and
uses his or her intuition, imagination and creativity. This article describes a few serendipi-
tous drug discoveries and discusses whether the good fortune will continue.
Penicillin
The drug most closely associated with serendipity is penicillin. Most of us in the regu-
latory profession are acquainted with that discovery and know we owe our antibiotic
armamentarium to a dirty Petri dish in Alexander Fleming’s laboratory. Fleming was
an English physician and microbiologist. Perhaps not all know that the organism, the
weather, a German refugee chemist and a rotten melon also played major roles.3
Development began in 1929, when Fleming noticed a zone of inhibition around a
colony of penicillium mold on an agar plate of Staphlycoccus. The mold that contaminated
the culture was a very rare organism traced to a mycology laboratory one floor below. Its
spore wafted up the stairway to settle on one of Fleming’s dishes at a particularly critical
instant—precisely when he implanted the agar with the bacteria. An intense heat wave in
London broke that day Fleming opened the dish, and the cooler weather allowed the peni-
cillium spore to survive. The story almost ended there, for Fleming could not siphon off
the fluid produced by the mold and inject it into patients. It was not until eight years later
that Ernst Boris Chain, a German expatriate chemist, developed a method for producing a
stable powder form.
The first clinical trial was performed on an infected patient who improved dramati-
cally with each injection. Unfortunately, the drug supply ran out and the patient died,
but his initial response encouraged further production and testing in five patients, four of
whom had miraculous recoveries.
Large-scale production followed in the US, and a search for a more productive strain
of the penicillium mold was sought. After worldwide exploration, an improved strain
was found on a rotting cantaloupe in Peoria, IL by a laboratory aide. (The fermentation
plant used to manufacture penicillin was located in Peoria.) The organism proved to be
Penicillium chrysogenum, a strain that produced 3,000 times more penicillin than Fleming’s
original mold. Not long after, the first 40 mg isolated by Chain in 1937 had increased to
four tons of pure drug produced in 1945.
Insulin
Fred Banting and J.J.R. Macleod won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1923 for the discovery
of insulin. Their discovery was monumental but it would not have been possible without
work done at the University of Strasbourg in 1889.
Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering had disagreed on whether pancreatic
enzymes were needed to digest fat. They decided to remove the pancreas from a dog
and observe the results. Some years later, Minkowski described how he kept the depan-
creatized dog tied up in the lab while waiting for von Mering to return from a trip. Even
though the animal was housebroken and taken out regularly, it kept urinating on the floor.
Minkowski decided to test the urine for the presence of sugar. His tests revealed 12%
Previous Page Next Page