Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in September 1928 and was not able to turn it into a medicine. He lacked the chemistry, the funding, and probably the interest. Thirteen years later, a team at Oxford led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain produced the first usable supplies, and the first patient treated in 1941 survived an … Read more
In 1847 a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that women delivered by medical students died of childbed fever at several times the rate of women delivered by midwives. He worked out why, proved it by making students wash their hands, and cut the death rate from about 18% to roughly 1%. His colleagues rejected … Read more
In 1869 a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev left gaps in his table of elements and announced that undiscovered elements belonged in them. He predicted their atomic weights, densities, and melting points. When gallium was found in 1875 and germanium in 1886, both matched his numbers closely. That is the moment the periodic table stopped … Read more