Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for March 03, 2015
Transcript:
Erik Weihenmayer and Lonnie Bedwell, who are both blind, successfully kayaked the Grand Canyon rapids on the Colorado River in September 2014- a 277 mile journey. The drug penicillin was once so rare that it was recycled from the urine of treated patients. A fanged frog found in the Indonesian rain forest in 2014 is the first frog discovered to give birth to live tadpoles.
During WW2, my mother ran the quality control lab on the only working penicillin line in the world. The problem was that fermenting something on an industrial scale while keeping it sterile at the same time is a bitch. Nowadays, antibiotics are mass produced by chemical synthesis or by mDNA, but it took years to work out how to do the first, and the second wasn’t even theoretically imagined then.