Bread Mold.
... I wrote this before the Pandemic
There hasn’t been a serious medical advance in disease prevention since the 1980’s.
or maybe Alexander Fleming and his Bread Mold.
It’s because now days we can’t let anything rot long enough for it to help us.
Instead we created preservatives. Keep something alive longer, devoid of nutritional value, empty, persevered and sad. You’re 110 year old grandmother on life-support.
September 28th, 1928. Penicillin was an accident.
“That’s funny.” Alexander Fleming said, as he saved the world.
Now the most common usage you would know Penicillin for was treating your gonorrhoea. Which if not treated increases your risk of prostrate cancer. They used to use Silver Nitrite but too much of that and you could develop Argyria and your skin and eyes would turn all blue and silver.
Penicillin has a million other uses.
and it was found by accident.
but we don’t let accidents happen anymore, everything is sterile and planned, and you have to have a grant and the blessing of the CDC to preform any kind of experiment and you have to have “proof of concept.”
And the golden age of medical curiosity is dying and being replaced by private company research giants, and privately funded studies of the cancer causing effects of preservatives that always come back inconclusive.
No more rot, No more accidents.
Now we preserve our baked goods,
so there can’t be any more bread mold.
It's interesting, actually– Ancient Egyptians used mouldy bread to treat infections millenia before Fleming’s discovery. Curious, isn’t it, how a great culture which lends so much of itself to modernity (through perfecting preservation) used the mouldy bread so differently to us? Only to save: lives, history, memory– we preserve not for survival, but because we refuse to let things die, because we’re afraid of the natural processes unfurling into ugliness, and because we believe happy accidents should be a creature of the past, something that has no place in civilised society. There’s a great irony here, I think: that beneath a well-preserved body is a rot. And we’re (still) afraid to rot.
That’s true though. What other kind of accidental discoveries could we make if we let things “go bad” every once and a while?