In a similar (even stranger?) vein, in the 1950s there were cyclops baby sheep related to maternal consumption of wild corn lillies. Many years later this led to discovery of the sonic hedgehog pathway and related targeted inhibitors like vismodegib and sonidegib.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine

Very interesting. It was around the same time as the discovery of penicillin. Were there other fungal medicines discover around that time? I believe statins and Cyclosporine were discovered much later.

A chemical from the fungus needed to react with a chemical from the clover. Either we got lucky (and the cows unlucky) that the fungus grew on the clover, instead of some plant with negligible amounts of coumarin, or else there are lots of other medically interesting combinations just out there in the environment that we haven't noticed because the necessary organisms don't interact often. Given the unimaginable numbers of naturally occurring biological chemicals out there, I'm guessing it wasn't luck, and the combinatorics made it inevitable.

It's also interesting how an attempted suicide by rat poison led to demonstration of an effective treatment for overdose that eventually led to its use as a medicine.

Though, minor nit about the second paragraph: a cow is a mature female bovine. I doubt any of the investigated deaths were cows that had undergone castration.

Kinda makes me sad how all groundbreaking & perhaps low-hanging fruits of the fundamental sciences seem already picked. Sure, working on optimization and the layers of abstraction has its importance but man it would have been crazy for the first radio transmission or the caffeine discovery. I hope miniaturized quantum sensing would be it for our generation.

It's been 80 years and we still haven't figured out how to reliably perform loading doses (when someone is just starting out on warfarin) and to maintain stable INR (anticoagulation effectiveness, essentially) in people who take it daily. Lots of work has been done on it, but it is petering out due to the recent introduction of new anticoagulation drugs that do not require regular monitoring.

I happen to take warfarin daily, happy to answer any questions!

Accidentally discovered items/things include: vulcanised rubber and nylon. Vulcanised rubber came as a result of research being done into developing non-perishable rubber, for which vulcanisation was a solution. In contrast... nylon was discovered during research done into developing a new kind of refrigerant!

Moral of the story... dunno. Maybe solutions can come before problems?