Here’s a simple question to ponder, although not an easy one to answer: Which medical advances from the past 100 years have made the greatest impact? And if you then posed that question to some of the world’s leading physicians and top intellectuals, how would they respond? What would they say to something that holds untold millions of lives in its answer?
Luckily, this is not a rhetorical exercise. Just last year, the Medical Research Council in London, a research-funding initiative with global reach, posed this very question to these very types of people. Many of the survey results are in the following pages, alongside other breakthroughs of such profound importance throughout the centuries that they changed the very core of medical practice.
Antibiotics and Their Incalculable Impact
When the Medical Research Council conducted its survey of medical advances of greatest import, the largest number of responses was for the discovery of antibiotics by Alexander Fleming. “Without antibiotics, modern medicine as we know it would be unrecognizable,” wrote Stephen Whitehead, chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.
A dramatic statement for a dramatic discovery — and one that owes its existence to the decidedly nondramatic fact that Fleming was a slob. In 1928, Fleming was researching the properties of the well-known Staphylococcus bacterium, which continues to haunt us today in the form of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant superbug.
