Failure Leads to Success More Often Than You Think! - Dr. Jerry Kavouras, Biology

One thing that rarely gets the press it deserves is the fact that failure has led to significant scientific discoveries. Sure we’re told to learn from our mistakes, but when in a laboratory environment we are mortified when something does not go according to plan. Sometimes, we made a mistake, or forgot something, it happens nobody’s perfect.

There are great stories about failure leading to success – typically when it comes to inventions. The post-it note came about from a 3M scientist’s inability to create a super strong glue. Bubble wrap was developed originally as wallpaper, which nobody wanted, so somebody figured out it worked well as packaging material. Failures that lead to scientific discoveries don’t get as much press. Sure we learn that Alexander Fleming was a sloppy scientist which led to the discovery of penicillin, but that’s not a mistake – it is poor lab technique.

I want to take a few minutes to highlight a failure which changed the way we viewed life in the 20th century and has led to incredible breakthroughs in the 21st – Frederick Griffith’s failure to develop a vaccine for Pneumococcus pneumoniae (now Streptococcus pneumoniae) in the 1920s. The bacterium caused meningitis and obviously pneumonia. His experiment is taught in introductory biology classes, so most students remember it as the dead mouse experiment. You see, he tried creating a vaccine using standard techniques of the time – killing the pathogen with heat. I don’t want to get into specifics because it’s not the focus of this blog, but let’s just say it did not work, regardless what he tried. However, he did observe the phenomenon of bacterial transformation where bacteria gain new properties, which was not something he was thinking about but is still an important discovery – think antibiotic resistant bacteria, among other things.

Why is that a big deal? The challenge to determine the “transforming principle” led to the discovery of DNA as coding the genetic information for life, which then led to the discovery of what genes are (yes, we used the term gene before we knew what they actually were), and then the creation of genetically modified organisms, and so on…

My point is simple. The path you start does not always lead to where you want to go, or think you’re going, but that’s not always a bad thing. I am sure you have, or will, read that on a fortune cookie.

Oh and by the way, we did develop a vaccine for Streptococcus pneumoniae….in 2005. It seems there were a few things we needed to discover along the way!