When you look at yourself, you wonder if you could be a genius who toiled around looking for one problem to solve only to have this light bulb moment when they come up with ideas that changed the world but actually, innovation isn't magic and in a lot of time, it is full of lucky coincidences, chances, and a lot of right place right time which means that I can also become a world inventor tomorrow.
You think it is a lie because of what you read from text books. A lot of these textbooks do not explain the details, they just make us believe that these people discovered something great like a light bulb click on their head and they do not tell us the details of the entire event. For you to have a different understanding of how innovations and life changing inventions came into existence, I will share one or two with you but you do not have to take my words for it, just look at the references and you will understand that it was true.
Image From Getarchive
The mRNA vaccine that became very pivotal in treating the COVID-19 pandemic didn't fall from the sky, and unlike what you would assume that it came from an idea spark, it actually was discovered from series of event. Contrary to what you might have read about it being discovered by Edward Jenner through a light bulb idea which was able to treat small pox and today it was used in covid-19 vaccine. The reality to this event is quite long and not straight forward.
In 18 century Europe, smallpox was so common that 95% of European adults had the disease and 1 in 10 people died from the smallpox plague. The doctors had the time decided to use the idea of stabbing people with the small pox from the Turks and they did it. They will get the pus from an infected person and stab a healthy person with the hope that the person gets infected with a mild version of the disease after which they heal and get protected from the virus. A process known as inoculation and while this worked for some people, they could also get the virus in full scale and die from it.
Image from look and learn
Edward Jenner was one of the children at the time that was stabbed with the virus but he survived and grew into an adult studying birds. It was his study on animals that led him to hypothesize that disease could be transferred from animals to humans and if this was possible, then these animals should be able to help us fight diseases. He had heard rumors that diary farmers and maids who collected milk from cows didn't suffer from small pox so he decided to investigate and his investigated led him to come up with some believe that since they caught the animal version of the smallpox disease (cowpox), they didn't need to catch the human version.
He wanted to be sure if the cowpox gave them immunity to smallpox, so in 1796 he decided to scrape out pus from a lady named Sarah Nelmes who suffered from cowpox which she got from a cow named blossom and injected the pus into an 8-year old boy named James phipps who was the son of his gardener. This wasn't regarded as child abuse at the time. James got fever from cowpox and recovered after which he was exposed to smallpox and nothing happened because he was immune from smallpox and this was where the word vaccination came from which originated from the latin word Vacca (cow).
Edward began to convince people to get vaccinated against smallpox including Napoleon who was in war and needed to vaccinate his army. The war was won, a few people made money, more inventions were made over the years including syringes and needles, and soon the Eiffel Tower was built and was meant to last for 20 years but it was very useful during world war one since it was a scientific research station at the time and it was also in the tower that the radio telegraph was invented so the french were able to steal information from their opponents.
Soon Needle and Syringe was invented, after which Ernst Ruska built the electron microscope in 1933 and this helped scientist to see extremely tiny thing using electron waves shorter than visible light. With this, scientist were able to see virus, and other tiny organisms. Life went on and a fellow named Francis Crick read Erwin Schrodinger's "what is life?" book and he began to search for information molecule where he discovered DNA in 1953. In 1960, he and Sydney Brenner were having a discussion on RNA and Protein and a possibility of an intermediate molecule and in the same year, Brenner discovered mRNA.
Majority of the people who discovered things just fueled their curiosity and they had an open mind with a lot of people working hand in hand to get results done directly o indirectly. So for us to get an mRNA vaccine, we started the creation of vaccine itself which was discovered thanks to curiosity and one cow, then to the creation of light, microscope and electron microscope, then to the study of life and then the discovery of DNA via an opened mind and curiosity, after which RNA was discovered and a messenger between RNA and protein from DNA was thought about and looked into and then we have mRNA. With the idea of vaccine, the creation of a microscope, the invention of an electron microscope, soda water, and a whole lot of things, mRNA was discovered and it was the same curiosity that led to the mRNA vaccine.
You Can Study More
https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/a-brief-history-of-vaccination
https://www.reidhealth.org/blog/history-of-vaccines
https://www.crick.ac.uk/about-us/our-history/about-dr-francis-crick
https://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/people/summary/crick
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7930303
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5602739/
https://www.trilinkbiotech.com/blog/who-discovered-messenger-rna-mrna/
https://www.rsb.org.uk/component/content/article?id=707:what-is-life-how-chemistry-becomes-biology
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982215006065
https://www.pasteur.fr/en/home/research-journal/news/discovery-messenger-rna-1961?language=fr
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1076567008701551
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8483746/
https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/52424.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7910833/
https://historyofvaccines.org/blog/the-history-of-the-mrna-vaccines
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8502079/
Posted Using INLEO
Thanks for your contribution to the STEMsocial community. Feel free to join us on discord to get to know the rest of us!
Please consider delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned).
You may also include @stemsocial as a beneficiary of the rewards of this post to get a stronger support.