Penicillin. Gemini tells me that the antibiotic effects of mold had been noted 30 years earlier, but nobody investigated it as a medicine in all that time.
Gemini is telling you a popular urban legend-level understanding of what happened. The creation of Penicillin as a random event, “by mistake”, has at most tangential touch with reality. But it is a great story, so it spread like wildfire.
In most cases when we read “nobody investigated” it actually means “nobody succeeded yet, so they weren’t in a hurry to make it known”, which isn’t very informative point of data. No one ever succeeds, until they do. And in this case it’s not even that—antibiotic properties of some molds were known and applied for centuries before that (well, obviously, before the theory of germs they weren’t known as “antibiotic”, just that they helped...), the great work of Fleming and later scientists was about finding the particularly effective type of mold and extracting the exact effective chemical as well as finding a way to produce that at scale.
Gemini is telling you a popular urban legend-level understanding of what happened. The creation of Penicillin as a random event, “by mistake”, has at most tangential touch with reality. But it is a great story, so it spread like wildfire.
In most cases when we read “nobody investigated” it actually means “nobody succeeded yet, so they weren’t in a hurry to make it known”, which isn’t very informative point of data. No one ever succeeds, until they do. And in this case it’s not even that—antibiotic properties of some molds were known and applied for centuries before that (well, obviously, before the theory of germs they weren’t known as “antibiotic”, just that they helped...), the great work of Fleming and later scientists was about finding the particularly effective type of mold and extracting the exact effective chemical as well as finding a way to produce that at scale.