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While science laboratory accidents that resulted in many products we all use todayand their stories have become legends, a few have remained below the radar of mostpeople.We know, for example, that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, but we maynot know about what happened when Fleming accidentally sneezed over the petridishes he was working with one day. Breathing masks were rarely found anywherein those days. He achooed over his whole experiment.Until that sneeze, the microbes in his petri dishes were multiplying nicely. After thesneeze, their growth stopped. Fleming had accidentally discovered an antibioticenzyme in his own nasal mucus. Being a modest fellow, he did not break the storyto the media with the headline "Snot Will Save The World."The last documented case of smallpox in the world was recorded in 1978 whenphotographer Janet Parker contracted the disease after the virus escaped fromconfinement in a lab at the University of Birmingham in England.For reasons that remained shrouded in history, German scientist Henning Brandkept 50 buckets of urine in his cellar for months in 1675. Well, Brand would preferthat the reason be shrouded in history. Actually he was trying to prove that once theurine evaporated it would leave a residue of gold. It was the heyday of alchemy,after all.The waxy glowing goo Brand found when he returned to his cellar those monthslater (after the smell had dissipated, he hoped) spontaneously burst into flames. Wenow know the goo as phosphorus.Until the 1750s more phosphorus was made by evaporating the urine of soldierssince collecting the pee of ordinary citizens was considered unseemly even in thosedays.Late in the First Millennium CE, Chinese alchemists (looking for a way to makegold again) put together and "elixir of immortality" formed from saltpetre, sulphur,realgar and dried honey. Alas, Chinese people didn't live any longer as a result of taking it. However, it became the first gunpowder. The Chinese are still well knownfor their spectacular fireworks which are nothing more than guns made of paper andexplosive materials.Roy Plunkett, a Dupont chemist working in a lab in 1938, opened a defectivecanister of what he thought should have been tetrafluoroethylene gas. Instead hefound an innocuous looking white powder. Playing with it he discovered that it wasnearly friction-free. So began Teflon.The glory days of Teflon passed in 2005 when the U.S. Environmental Protectionagency tagged one ingredient in Teflon, perfluorooctanoic acid, as a "likely
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