Sunday, January 2, 2011

Serendipity - Accidental Discovery

A person wants to do something but ended up in doing something else. This doing something else is called Serendipity, means accidental discovery. If we look at the present world this term has become very common because people wants to do something but they are doing something else. For Example; the discovery of pencillin by Alexander Fleming. He was examining a culture of Staphylococcus aureus, a pathogenic bacterium on which he was doing some research, when he noticed that it had become contaminated by a species of Penicillium. Although, the species of the mold was unknown to Fleming, at the time, he did observe that it was inhibiting the bacterial growth. Fleming wrote a paper on his findings in 1929 and the rest is history. However, it was never that simple. Such a short summary really does not tell you the entire story, and in this case, says that Fleming's discovery of penicillin was one of chance. In our lives also such things happen as we plan to do something but we land up in doing something else. Sometimes a discovery by chance is very useful because Fleming never knew that the Culture which he examined will heal the whole world in world war II.

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