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Asked by sloth-savior to Aaron, David, Elaine, Sarah, Zoe on 17 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by louisa.
Question: how often are drugs accidently discovered e.g. penicillin was found when a piece of mold was dropped in a petri dish.(sorry if my historical knowledge of the discovery is not quite right)
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David Foley answered on 17 Nov 2014:
There are many examples of drugs being accidentally discovered throughout history. We like to convince ourselves that we now carry out “rational” drug discovery, but the truth is that we often rely on chance to develop a drug. In fact, another famous (and far more recent) example of such good fortune was the discovery of Viagra (I’m sure you know what that is prescribed for 🙂 ). It was originally in a clinical trial for a heart condition, but the male volunteers noticed an “interesting” side-effect!
Most scientific breakthroughs are a result of the unexpected happening. In fact, they say that the words used to herald a great discovery is not “eureka” but rather “that’s funny…”
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Zoe Roberts answered on 18 Nov 2014:
Your historic knowledge is fine! There are many cases where drugs have been discovered ‘by accident’. It is more common than you think. Our job as scientists is to make observations on the natural world. We try our best to come up with logical ways to make a new drug but sometimes science has other ideas!
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Sarah Ashwood answered on 21 Nov 2014:
You’d be surprised how often it has happened!
We all try and work logically and be rational about our decisions – the idea of drug design is a big thing and we like to think that we are using reasonable judgement to make decisions about what to do. But the truth of it is that we often don’t know what will happen and much of it does rely on chance making the correct molecule at the correct time.
Sometimes you make something expecting it to work against one thing and the actual effects it has are very different!
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