This, from this week’s Nature
Two chemicals widely used in cleaning agents for homes, offices and hospitals cause birth defects and fertility problems in mice whose cages have been in contact with them, according to Patricia Hunt at Washington State University in Pullman.
…
[They] were identified after an exhaustive search for what was causing a massive drop-off in mouse fertility after Hunt moved her research animals to Pullman from Case Western Reserve Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2005. The chemicals were in the disinfectant Virex used in the facility.
And it is only, presumably, because she moved that this came to light.
But wait! There’s more! She’s had a serendipitous discovery before – egg defects in her research animals caused by a “chemical that began leaching from plastic water bottles after a high-pH floor detergent was mistakenly used to clean them.”
So how important is serendipity to science, and to your work?
I should add that this post is a great example of why NN is blogheavy – I wanted to post this in a forum, but just got bewildered by which forum I should post in, I just thought “ah… I’ll just blog it”.
Feel free to let me know which forum you think this should have gone in.
It was Pasteur who said “Chance favors the prepared mind.” But he probably said it in French.
Serendipity is not something that can be planned for. If it was planned for, it wouldn’t be serendipity. But it does take a prepared mind to take advantage of it. A mind that has the space, mental and other wise to look beyond the immediate task.
I think the chance for serendipity is a large part of what is lost when the screws of “scientific competition” are turned up.
I think serendipity is fractal in nature – it happens in the same way at different levels.
Unlike David, I think it’ll continue – we’ll still talk to each other, or read a blog article that will spark some idea.
Scott, you write: I wanted to post this in a forum, but just got bewildered by which forum I should post in, I just thought “ah… I’ll just blog it”.
I have occasionally been tempted to ask to start a NN blog for just this reason – wanting to communicate something and not being sure which forum. So far I have resisted because I have too many blogs already (I don’t count my NN “blog” as a proper blog as it is an archive of a column I write.)
As discussed elsewhere on the Network though (don’t ask me to find it ;-) ), I find the forums/groups similarly overdiverse. There are a lot of them but many are inactive. It takes a lot of effort to keep a forum/group going, compared with how easy it is to start one. Matt and Corie say that a rationalisation is in the works for the next NN upgrade, which I am sure will help.
In this particular case, we have a Nature News and Opinion forum, for discussion of _Nature_’s opinion-type journal content in sections that don’t (yet) have an online commenting facility. But I think it is fine to blog about it, rather than put it in a forum. Posting a blog entry allows the blogger to add their personal, even idiosyncratic take on a topic (as you’ve done here) – more freely than on a forum, where the discussions that I have seen tend to be more Q/A-style, and stick to the one topic of the forum entry – a blog discussion tends to be more open-ended and free-ranging.
_In this particular case, we have a Nature News and Opinion forum, for discussion of Nature’s opinion-type journal content in sections that don’t (yet) have an online commenting facility. _
Oh, yes. I didn’t spot that. I should perhaps have thought of that. But then, the subject was beyond Nature – so I wondered about the Postgrads forum as a place for comment from them, and…
I think there’s a fair bit of pruning that can be done to the forums (and is there a case that forums and groups are semantically equivalent and so should be merged?).
Bob, I think it will continue, just that there will be more missed opportunities the more “competition” there is. We won’t know what those missed opportunities were because they have been missed.
I think this is the problem of a miss match between someone having ideas that should be developed and having the resources to develop the ideas that should be developed.
Ability at generating ideas that should be taken further is not necessarily always coupled with the ability to generate the resources to take them farther.
Ability at generating ideas that should be taken further is not necessarily always coupled with the ability to generate the resources to take them farther.
So serendipity is about having the idea, spotting it is An Idea, and then having the luck/effort/guts to see it through?
Scott, yes, the maturation of an idea as it goes from conception to publication/acceptance is a chain. Every link in that chain needs to be successful for that to happen. The weakest link in that chain needs to be strengthened, not eliminated. I am afraid that some types of competition serve to eliminate links rather than strengthen them.
When “success” in science is measured by how many chains a scientist has produced compared to how many his/her competitor has produced, breaking your competitor’s chain is a “success” strategy.