Yes, I mentioned; X-rays, Rosetta Stone, vulcanized rubber, nylon, quinine, electric battery, dynamite, vaccination, Big Bang, radioactivity, saccharin, microwave oven, Play-doh, Corn Flakes, Super Glue and Velcro. Let’s look at two from the medical field: penicillin and insulin. Both have saved or extended the lives of millions.

In 1928, a Scottish professor of bacteriology, Authur Fleming, noticed that mold began to grow in his Petri dish of colonies of Staphylococcus bacteria. Fleming smeared Staphylococcus bacteria on a culture plate before going on vacation. While he was gone, a mold spore flew into the lab through an open window in another nearby lab where molds were being studied. When he returned, Fleming found that the bacteria had grown and covered the entire plate, except for one area, which was covered with mold.

After investigating further, Fleming found a substance in the mold that prevented the growth of bacteria, even when diluted 800 times. Fleming discovered that the mold was a type called Penicillium notatum. This mold is similar to the fuzzy green mold that grows on bread. From the mold, Fleming developed the antibiotic now known as penicillin.

Until the late 1930s, penicillin was used to treat infections in hospitals. During World War II, military doctors used penicillin to treat infected wounds. Veterinarians also used penicillin. Penicillin is now widely used in the treatment of throat infections, meningitis, pneumonia and other infections. Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who also worked on the development of penicillin as a drug.

In 1889, two doctors from the University of Strasbourg, Oscar Minkowski and Josef von Mering, were trying to understand how the pancreas affected digestion. They removed the pancreas from a living dog. A few days later, they noticed flies congregating around the dog’s urine. It is not normal or expected. They tested the urine and found sugar in it. The doctors figured them out; they had given the dog diabetes. Minkowski and von Mering never determined what the pancreas produces that regulates blood sugar.

In 1921, a young Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and surgeon, Frederick Banting and his assistant, Charles Best, figured out how to remove insulin from a dog’s pancreas. Before insulin was discovered by Banting and Best, people with diabetes did not live long. There was not much the doctors could do for them. The most effective treatment was to put diabetes patients on very strict diets with minimal carbohydrate intake. This might buy patients a few extra years, but it wouldn’t save them. Harsh diets, some prescribed as little as 450 calories a day, sometimes even starved patients.

Banting and Best kept a dog with severe diabetes alive for 70 days. The dog only died when it was no longer extracted. Later, a more refined and pure form of insulin was developed, this time from the pancreas of cattle.

In January 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy dying of diabetes in a Toronto hospital, became the first person to receive an injection of insulin. Within 24 hours, Leonard’s dangerously high blood glucose levels had dropped to near-normal levels.

The news about insulin spread around the world like wildfire. In 1923, Banting and Best were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, shared by two other researchers. Soon after, Eli Lilly began large-scale production of insulin. It wasn’t long before there was enough insulin to supply the entire North American continent.

Sources: howstuffworks, diabetes council, nih.com