I spend a lot of my time writing stuff; newspaper articles, emails and reports for clients and it always upsets me when I look at something I wrote some while ago and discover a spelling mistake, incorrect punctuation or just some messy language. I know there are more important things to worry about, but it still distresses me. Maybe, we should embrace our failings and our mistakes? Maybe we should embrace the unexpected? In fact, some of the greatest examples of progress have come from mistakes and mishaps.
The most famous was penicillin, the first of the major antibiotics. Its discoverer, Alexander Fleming left his laboratory for a holiday and on his return found that some of his petri dishes containing bacteria had been contaminated by a mould, the story goes because they’d been left near an accidentally open window. What Fleming noticed was that the mould had killed off some of the bacteria. Being the curious sort he wanted to know why. Years later he got a Nobel Prize for his discovery and, perhaps above all, his scientific curiosity.
