It seems that the discovery of Coenzyme Q10 was not an accidental discovery in the way that the discovery of penicillin was. A look at the history of Coenzyme Q10 reveals a determined progression of researchers toward greater understanding of the cellular mechanisms that produce energy in our cells.
To go back to the beginning, in 1954, Professor R. A. Morton and his colleagues in Great Britain carried out a number of studies on a mysterious lipid-soluble substance that they found everywhere in animal tissue, e.g. in the tissue of horse intestines, in the tissue of rat livers, and in the tissue of various organs in pigs. The British researchers got close, but they couldn't quite identify the substance.