Penicillin
In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a Scottish doctor, pharmacologist and bacteriologist, was conducting experiments in his laboratory. He was growing a certain bacterium in a petri dish when he noticed that one of the samples was covered with mold. However, it was no ordinary mold – during his research, Fleming noticed that it was killing the bacteria!

This mold later became known as penicillin and became one of the most important medical discoveries the world has ever made. However, its widespread use was not solely due to Fleming. When he published an article about his discovery, as is often the case, no one paid much attention to it-except Howard Florey and Ernest Boris Chein, two biochemists who went on to develop his invention.

It is worth noting that all three scientists together won the Nobel Prize for their work on penicillin, and the mold itself, according to experts, has subsequently saved two hundred million lives since its discovery

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Taxol
You may not remember what Taxol is because you don’t come across the name every day, but in fact, you may have heard of it at least once – it is one of the most effective cancer drugs around the world. It works by preventing cancer cells from dividing, which ultimately leads to their death. For cancer, whose cells are known to divide very rapidly, Taxol is like poison.

It was discovered back in the 1960s, when Monroe Wall and Mansukh Wani were collecting tree samples as part of a U.S. National Cancer Institute project to find new substances to fight cancer. The two medical chemists took samples of trees and plants, including Pacific yew, and found a substance in them that was toxic to the cells of the disease. They called it paclitaxel, and over the following decades it was subjected to systematic laboratory testing before it was finally prescribed to patients in 1992.

Since then, paclitaxel has proven so effective that environmentalists began to worry about the dangers of the scale of production of the drug, which is harming the Pacific yew. These days, experts have not stopped studying the content and characteristics of this chemical in various biomaterials.

Anesthesia
In the past, if someone needed a medical operation, the only possible way to relieve pain was to drink plenty of alcohol and hope for the best. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did this change when William Morton, a dentist and amateur chemist, discovered that animals would lose consciousness after inhaling sulfuric ether. In 1846 Morton gave a grand performance, performing dental surgery on a patient under anesthesia in front of an applauding crowd.