Where Credit is Due

Louis Pasteur moved to the podium a book in his hand.
"Gentlemen, first I wish to apologize for my mistake in not giving you knowledge of my failures."
There was muttering.
Lifting the book up, Pasteur continued. "This is The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif first published 1926...31 years after I or rather the other mes died. It relates an accident that occurred in 1877 that I didn't realize the true implications of."
Opening the book Pasteur started reading.
"He had not the precise methods of growing microbes pure—it took the patience of Koch to devise such things—and one day to his disgust, Pasteur observed that a bottle of boiled urine in which he had planted anthrax bacilli was swarming with unbidden guests, contaminating microbes of the air that had sneaked in. The following morning he observed that there were no anthrax germs left at all; they had been completely choked out by the bacilli from the air.
At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea: "If the harmless bugs from the air choke out the anthrax bacilli in the bottle, they will do it in the body too! It is a kind of dog-eat-dog!" shouted Pasteur, and at once he put Roux and Chamberland to work on the fantastic experiment of giving guinea-pigs anthrax and then shooting doses of billions of harmless microbes into them—beneficent germs which were to chase the anthrax bacilli round the body and devour them—they were to be like the mongoose which kills cobras. . .
Pasteur gravely announced: "That there were high hopes for the cure of disease from this experiment," but that is the last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the world of science the benefit of studying his failures."
Closing the book Pasteur looked at the people in the audience. "I was right and I was wrong. I was right in that it had high hopes for the cure of disease but I was wrong in it being microbes that had killed my anthrax samples."
More muttering.
"It was a mold and it has a name - Penicillin."
Category:Five Earths - Vignettes