If antibiotics were not discovered when and how they were, would we ever have discovered them?
Reminds me of one of the better episodes of the show “Sliders.” In it, the interdimensional travelers find themselves in a world in which antibiotics were never discovered – no one thought to look at icky molds as a source of medicine.
well, we went out looking for them, so yes, I think we’'d have discovered them eventually. The search for the “magic bullet” which would kill diseases but not us, had been going on for at least a millenium. It was only a matter of time. We may have found the first penicillin in mold, but we’ve found other antibiotics in plants, animals, and now in test tubes courtesy of the molecular engineers.
Qadgop, MD