Serendipity in Scientific Discovery: A Closer Look

SERENDIPITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY: A CLOSER LOOK HOWARD GEST* The word serendipity was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, in a letter to one of his correspondents: I once read a silly fairy tale, called "The Princes of Serendip" [an ancient name for Sri Lanka] ; and as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand Serendipity? [I]. In an interesting essay on creativity and scientific discovery, Luis Leloir, the 1970 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, discussed serendipity and noted that The faculty ofmaking happy chance finds requires also careful and wise observation ... A trained research worker would surely find the evidence ver)' weak and the behavior of the mule rather odd. He surely would recommend confirmatory work such as observing the eating habits of a mule that has one eye covered. [2] Discussions of serendipity in scientific research tend to overemphasize "accident" as the prime factor, but the path from accidental observation to a significant discovery is usually forged by curiosity and hard work. Frequently overlooked in Walpole's original definition is the requirement for sagacity, the ability to see what is relevant and significant, or keen judgement . Numerous noteworthy researches in biological science were "directed ," in a sense, by serendipic observations, but it is often not easy to identify a single serendipic event as the crucial happening. This is illustrated in the following by several case histories. *Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405.© 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/97/4101-1044$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 41, 1 ¦ Autumn 1997 21 Pasteur: "Chance Favors Only the Prepared Mind" Pasteur's brilliant career included many episodes in which serendipity led to important discoveries. The ' 'accidents" occurred so often that in his biography of Pasteur, Dubos lists a number of index entries under "Pasteur's luck" [3] . Two examples illustrate Pasteur's propensity for serendipic luck. During the course of his research on optical activity of organic compounds, Pasteur noticed that a tartrate solution had become turbid due to mold growth during warm weather. He found that D-tartrate was readily destroyed by the "mold fermentation," whereas the L-form was unaltered: The solution of paratartrate, at first optically inactive, soon becomes perceptibly levorotatory, and the rotation gradually increases and attains a maximum. The fermentation then stops. There is now no trace of the dextro tartaric acid left in the liquid, which on being evaporated and treated with an equal volume of alcohol yields a fine crop of crystals of ammonium levo tartrate. It was an accident which gave the clue to the solution of the problem [i.e., vaccination ]. Pasteur had begun experiments on chicken cholera in the spring of 1879, but a trivial difficulty came to interrupt the work after the summer vacation; the cultures of chicken cholera bacillus that had been kept in the laboratory during the summer failed to produce disease when inoculated into chickens. A new, virulent culture obtained from a natural outbreak was inoculated into new animals, and also into the chickens which had resisted the old cultures. The new animals, just brought from the market, succumbed to the infection in the customary length of time, thus showing that the culture was very active. But to the surprise of e.11, and of Pasteur himself, almost all the other chickens survived the infection . . . Pasteur immediately recognized in this accidental occurrence an analog)' with cowpox vaccination . [3] No wonder that Pasteur frequently said: "In the field ofexperimentation, chance favors only the prepared mind." Pasteur was a great exemplar of capitalizing on serendipity in research. He was able to exploit an accidental observation with intuition, sagacity, and persistence. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and Vitamin C The Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi made a number of important pioneering discoveries on the mechanisms of biological oxidations and muscle biochemistry. He is also widely known as the discoverer...