Thought for the Day Doubt - Three

Acorns

I have been thinking about the ways in which doubt affects us. Some would say that it is the foundation of modern medical science. But it appears that doubt caused a delay of ten years in the development of penicillin at a time when many patients needed it.

From the beginning, Alexander Fleming believed that there was value in penicillin. But he had previously discovered other chemicals that hadn’t proved to be of much use in medical practice. His colleagues and the drug companies were doubtful of him.

Fleming himself had doubts about systemic drug therapy by injection. To date, the chemicals that had killed bacteria had been pretty toxic to the human body, too.

But when war began to loom on the horizon of Europe once again, three scientists in Oxford, Professor Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley began to work on penicillin to see how they could produce it in large enough quantities to treat thousands of people, and if they could show that it was not too toxic to the body – things that Fleming had been unable to do.

Florey and his team wrote a report about their work that appeared in the Lancet in 1942. The following year, they wrote again about penicillin’s curative action on a series of patients. It wasn’t long until penicillin was being used on wounded soldiers.

Sometimes, in our personal lives, it is a time of difficulty or challenge that forces us to focus our mind on our doubts.