Jason Crawford

Just a couple of quick examples here.

Edison and his lab famously tested thousands of materials to create a practical, long-lived light bulb.

This is often portrayed as sort of a haphazard search.

But Edison actually understood more of the science behind this stuff than he is typically given credit for.

And unlike many other inventors of his day, Edison realized that to make an efficient light bulb system and power generation system, you actually wanted the light bulb filament to be high resistance, not low resistance.

And then that was going to optimize the power requirements of the whole system.

And so that, among other things, was guiding sort of the search.

That's why he was testing things like cotton filaments and bamboo and that sort of stuff.

I mean, another example is the way we screen drugs.

So drugs are often found by just screening a whole bunch of known compounds and just testing a whole bunch of things.

But, you know, sometimes the way we even find those compounds is that we start from known compounds and maybe ones that have some sort of activity, you know, that we think is related to what we want to find.

So, in fact, the entire field of antibiotics got started in part because there was this German scientist, Paul Ehrlich, not to be confused with the population bomb guy, by the way, that was a different guy, an American, much later on.

The German Paul Ehrlich, sort of the father of antibiotics in a sense, he had developed the technique of histology where you could stain tissues to sort of see them under the microscope.

And he found that certain chemicals would stain bacteria and not stain the surrounding tissue.

And this gave him a hint that we might be able to find what he called the magic bullet, which is something that would kill the bacteria and not damage the surrounding tissue.

That's what you need for antibiotics.

We already had ways to kill bacteria like with bleach and acid and heat.

Those things don't work in the body because, of course, the trick is to kill the germ without killing the host.

And so we needed a special chemical that was going to selectively bind to the bacteria and kill it.

And so Ehrlich noticed that we had these things that selectively stained the tissue.