Insulin
Although many of the discoveries on this list happened by sheer chance and the person responsible wasn’t even looking to change the world in the way they did, few discoveries, well none in fact, can attribute their success to a peeing dog and a few hungry flies. When it comes to insulin, that’s precisely what happened.
In 1889, University of Strasbourg doctors Oscar Minkowski and Josef von Mering were conducting experiments on the pancreas hoping to understand the organs effect on digestion. As your average human wasn’t too keen of having their pancreas removed, they turned to a healthy dog and removed its instead.
However, a few days later they noticed flies swarming around the dogs urine, something the two found very strange. Cleaning up the dog urine that’s been lying on the laboratory floor for days apparently wasn’t strange.
After testing the dogs urine and finding high levels of sugar in it, they quickly surmised that by removing the dogs pancreas they had inadvertently given the dog diabetes. The two never actually figured out what the pancreas produced that regulated blood sugar, but their discovery allowed future researchers at the University of Toronto to isolate a pancreatic secretion that they called insulin.
