Congratulation to my students who sat for the Kuiz Kimia Kebangsaan 2009. All of you have done your best.
Especially to Nuramirah Syahirah Rizalman and Pg Iqhwan Ashraf Pg Mohd Kamil who achieved the highest score in this quiz.
Congrats!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Antibiotics
The value of hardwork and logical thinking should not be underestimated. But pure luck also plays a role in most real scientific breakthroughs.
The supreme example of luck in all scientific hystory occurred in the late summer of 1928 when the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming went on vacation, leaving in his lab a culture plate recently inoculated with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus.
While Fleming was away, an extraordinary chain of events occured.. First , a 9 day cold spell lowered the lab temperature to a point where the Staphylococcus on the plate could not grow. During this time, spores from a colony of the mold Penicillium notatum being grown on the floor below wafted up into Fleming's lab and landed in the culture plate.
The temperature then rose, and both Staphylococcus and Penicillium began to grow.
On returning from vacation, Fleming discarded the plate into a tray of antiseptic.
Evidently though the plate did not sink deeply enough into the antiseptic, because when Fleming happened to glance at it a few days later, what he saw changed the course of human history :
He noticed that the growing Penicillium mold appeared to dissolve the colonies of staphylococci .
Fleming realized that the Penicillium mold must producing a chemical that killed the Staphylococcus bacteria, and he spent several years trying to isolate the substance .
Finally in 1939, the Australian pathologist Howard Florey and the German refugee Ernst Chain managed to isolate the active substance , called penicillin.
By 1943, penicillin was being produced on a large scale for military use, and by 1944 it was being used on civilians. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine.
The supreme example of luck in all scientific hystory occurred in the late summer of 1928 when the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming went on vacation, leaving in his lab a culture plate recently inoculated with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus.
While Fleming was away, an extraordinary chain of events occured.. First , a 9 day cold spell lowered the lab temperature to a point where the Staphylococcus on the plate could not grow. During this time, spores from a colony of the mold Penicillium notatum being grown on the floor below wafted up into Fleming's lab and landed in the culture plate.
The temperature then rose, and both Staphylococcus and Penicillium began to grow.
On returning from vacation, Fleming discarded the plate into a tray of antiseptic.
Evidently though the plate did not sink deeply enough into the antiseptic, because when Fleming happened to glance at it a few days later, what he saw changed the course of human history :
He noticed that the growing Penicillium mold appeared to dissolve the colonies of staphylococci .
Fleming realized that the Penicillium mold must producing a chemical that killed the Staphylococcus bacteria, and he spent several years trying to isolate the substance .
Finally in 1939, the Australian pathologist Howard Florey and the German refugee Ernst Chain managed to isolate the active substance , called penicillin.
By 1943, penicillin was being produced on a large scale for military use, and by 1944 it was being used on civilians. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine.
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