SCIENCE
Accidental Laboratory Discoveries
By Dr Rizwana Rahim
Chicago, IL
Serendipity has always had a
major part of science. What you discover is not
always what you were looking for, and what you thought
was a failure may turn out to be an accidental discovery
that may not necessarily stay within the context
it was intended to remain. The November issue of
‘Discover’ magazine listed a few:
1. In the 9th century, Chinese alchemist were trying
to synthesize an ‘elixir of immortality’
by mixing salt-peter, sulfur, realgar and dried
honey. The result was gun-powder.
2. In 1675, a German scientist, Hennig Brand, stored
50 buckets of urine in his cellar for a few months,
hoping it’d turn into gold. What he found
instead was a waxy, glowing substance that spontaneously
burst into flames. What he had on his hand was phosphorus.
Using this knowledge, soldiers supplied urine in
large quantities till 1750s. This led the Swedish
chemist, Carl Scheele, to produce phosphorus on
an industrial scale. In the process, he managed
to discover 8 other elements, including chlorine,
oxygen and nitrogen, along with compounds like ammonia,
glycerin and prussic acid.
Scheele was found dead in his lab. He was just 43,
and the cause of his death may have been his habit
of tasting the compounds he produced.
3. In 1938, DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett opened a
bad canister of Tetrafluoroethylene gas, and found
a white powder, nearly friction-free. He named it
Teflon. A Teflon ingredient, perflouro-octanoic
acid, in the blood of about 95% of Americans, and
in 2005, EPA determined it is a “likely carcinogen”
in humans.
4. After a 1997 drug trial in the Welsh mining town,
Merthyr Tydfill, male volunteers in the trial reported
that sildenafil citrate did nothing for their angina,
but it did have some other effects. That drug is
now known as Viagra.
5. In 1943, a Swiss chemist (Albert Hoffman) accidentally
absorbed tiny amounts of lysergic acid through his
fingertips and experienced “dizziness –
visual distortions and [a] desire to laugh.”
That was LSD. Hoffmann turned 100 last January.
6. In 1965, astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson suspected that the hissing sound in their
instruments at Bell Laboratories may be caused by
the pigeon droppings on their radio antenna. They
scrubbed the material off, but the hissing persisted.
That noise turned out to be the micro-wave echo
of what we know as the Big Bang that created our
Universe.
7. In the interstellar cloud of gas astronomers
found organic molecules in the center of the Milky
Way: 8 new organics (6-8 atoms each) in the last
2 years. One compound, acetamide, is of particular
importance because it has a peptide-bond, crucial
between 2 amino acids. This supports the theory
that chemical precursors of life may have been first
formed in deep space. So far, about 125 smaller
carbon- based molecules have been identified in
the space.
Jan M. Hollis ( Goddard Space Flight Center ) had
said earlier: “No one has ever found an amino
acid in space… [and] I’ve actually written
several papers about not finding them.”
In the Miller-Urey experiments in 1950s, an electric
current passed through a flask containing suspected
elements of primitive Earth did produce a rich soup
of amino acids.
8. Some other products of the so-called blunders
are: Kevlar, cellophane, Post-It notes, photographs
and phonographs.
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