On September 28, 1928, a scientist in the laboratory of St. Mary’s Hospital in London noticed that someone had left the lid off of a petri dish containing Staphylococcus plate culture. As a result of someone’s mistake, a blue mould “contaminated” the petri dish, inhibiting the growth of the bacteria.
Had this scientist worked at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where the ClimateGate emails and documents were recently hacked, he might have performed a “trick” (i.e. thrown away the petri dish) in order to “hide the decline” of Staphylococcus bacteria. Fortunately for the human race, this scientist chose instead to investigate why this anomaly occurred, even though it didn’t fit into his preconceived understanding of microbiology.
The scientist was Alexander Fleming. The blue mould, Penicillium, was later developed into penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic.
But that’s not the end of the story. By 1931, Fleming was convinced that penicillin couldn’t last in the human body long enough to kill pathogenic bacteria, and he stopped studying it. Fortunately, two other scientists (Boris Chain and Walter Florey) continued to work on developing penicillin.
Did Fleming threaten the editors of the journals that published Chain and Florey’s work or try to “re-define what the peer-review literature is” (like CRU Director Phil Jones and others did to those whose research contradicted theirs)? On the contrary, Fleming not only allowed the research of Chain and Florey to proceed, he was eventually won over by their findings and himself began working on penicillin again in 1934. In the end, Fleming, Chain and Florey all won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945.
Untold millions of lives have been saved from infections that would have previously been fatal, all because a British scientist dared to put pettiness, ego, and politics aside and follow the scientific evidence to where it ultimately led.