Bài 2

Alexander Fleming's most famous discovery happened entirely by accident. One day he was cleaning the culture dishes in his lab when he saw mould growing on one of the plates. There weren't any germs growing around the mould, so Fleming decided to grow more of it for experiments. He discovered that the mould acted against bacterial infections. However, Fleming's initial publication about his discovery was largely ignored by the medical community so he abandoned his research in 1932. It wasn't until 1935, when the researchers Florey and Chain saw Fleming's research papers, that the drug, penicillin, was developed.

Harold Ridley, an ophthalmologist, developed a revolutionary way of helping people with poor eyesight as a result of cataracts¹ . During World War II, Ridley worked with RAF pilots with eye injuries. He noticed that their eyes did not become infected when they had eye injuries caused by bits of Perspex from the windows of their planes. As a result of this observation he decided to implant plastic lenses in the eyes of people with cataracts. Surgeons had earlier tried replacing the lens in the eye with a glass one, but the operations always failed because the body rejected the glass lens. Ridley's operations with plastic lenses were successful. However, the medical community opposed Ridley's discoveries and it took many years for the technique to be accepted. Today over 200 million people have their sight because of Harold Ridley.

¹ Cataracts are regions of dead cells within the lens of the eye, and can cause blindness.