Storytelling for Week 12: Discovery

Not too long ago there was a genius that was born by the name of Jim. Everyone knew this little kid was going to do great things and make great discoveries as soon as he was born because he was solving basic math equations as soon as he was one year old. He grew up being the top of his class and even graduated high school at fourteen. He even graduated from college three short years later. He had every company trying to hire him on to do research at their facilities to find a cure for diseases.

One day he actually accepted an offer from a biochemical company to look into a cure for different diseases. He worked many years to find an antibiotic that would work against bacterial infections. The company he worked for started to lose faith in him and started to pull money from his research facility because they could not see any progress. No matter the amount of begging he did to keep his funding he could not. Even though he showed scientific evidence that showed progress, the business people that ran the company did not understand the evidence and saw no progress for themselves.

Eventually he asked a member of the board of the company for a few more thousand dollars because he was so close. This member he asked favored the young scientist so he funded him the money. A month later he discovered a drug that would cure almost all bacteria. The drug would come to be known as penicillin. Just to make sure the drug was healthy for people in the long run he ran many test on animals for short and long term effects. He would not release the drug to the company because he did not know the long terms of its effects yet.

Sadly the testing took so long that another scientist that goes by the name of Alexander Fleming discovered the drug because he had worked with Jim until the company cut the funding and he had to leave. Alexander knew how to find and isolate the drug so he did it right after Jim. Alexander didn't care about the effects of the drug in the long run. He only saw the short term effects of healing any bacterial infection and published his finding immediately.

This lead to the finding being credited to Fleming. Later Jim realized that the long term effects of using penicillin would whatever bacteria being treated to create a mutation against the penicillin and to grow stronger and healthier than before. By the time Jim realized this he tried to tell everyone but no one would listen to him because he was looked at as the looser of the antibacterial race.

a mold that produces penicillin

Author's Note

This story is based off the story "Clever Elsie". I chose to write this story because I am familiar with this field of study and the discovery of penicillin. I chose to write this story about the careful guy losing and the guy in it for the money winning because that is how society is today. There wasn't actually a guy named Jim but Alexander Fleming did discover penicillin. 

Bibliography

"Clever Elsie" by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, from Brothers Grimm (1812). Web Source: UNtextbook