Amazing Grace
There's no defeat, in truth, save from within;
Unless you're beaten there, you're bound to win!
Henry Austin
Thy part is with broken saber
To rise on the last redoubt.
Louise Imogen Guiney In 1928 Alexander Fleming made a careless mistake, which wasn't his custom. He had completed university and medical school with academic distinction and served with honor in the army medical corps in World War I. Then he returned to research and teaching at the Royal College of Surgeons, trying to find antibacterial substances that would be nontoxic to animal tissues. And he had achieved a measure of success. While researching influenza, however, he somehow contaminated a staphylococcus culture dish with mold and ruined the culture. That uncharacteristically careless act resulted in what has been termed a "triumph of accident and shrewd observation," for Fleming noticed the mold had produced a bacteriafree spot in the previously thriving staphylococcus colony. Upon further investigation, he observed the mold produced a substance that prevented staphylococcus growth, even when diluted eight hundred times. He christened that substance penicillin, and medicine has not been the same since. For his mistake, Fleming was knighted, and in 1945 shared the Nobel prize. Because of Sir Alexander Fleming's mistake, hundreds of thousands of people have been healed and even saved from death. We could use more mistakes of that sort. When another man was but seven years old, his family was forced out of their home on a legal technicality, and he had to begin working to help support them. At age nine, his mother died. At twenty-two, he lost his job as a store clerk. He wanted to go to law school, but his education wasn't good enough. At twenty-three, he went into ...
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