91av

(Image: Patrick George)

IF YOU want to make petunias a deeper purple, you could just add an extra pigment gene, right? Wrong: the extra gene turns the flowers white. This surprising finding was made independently in the early 1990s by two plant biologists, Richard Jorgensen in the US and Joseph Mol in the Netherlands. Neither dismissed the finding as an error. They suspected they’d found something big, and they had: an entirely new way in which cells regulate gene expression, now called RNA interference. RNAi has since been the subject of a Nobel prize, has saved lives and promises to save many more.

This is by no means the only example of good luck in science. Percy Spencer, an engineer at the US company Raytheon, was working on a radar set in 1945 when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket was melting. That observation led, two years later, to Raytheon introducing the first commercial microwave oven. In 1976, chemist Shashikant Phadnis’s boss asked him to test a chlorinated sugar compound being studied as a potential insecticide. Phadnis misheard it as a request to “taste” the stuff – a scary mistake to make in his line of work – and found it was extremely sweet. . Viagra was a drug proving not so effective for heart conditions before someone noticed an interesting and highly marketable side effect.

(Image: Patrick George)

Examples like these show that chance plays a role, sometimes a dramatic one, in the progress of science. Yet how much do we really know about its contribution? Its influence would be easier to gauge if we could pin down how it shows up: is it like buying a winning lottery ticket – something that can happen to anyone – or was Louis Pasteur right to say that “chance favours only the prepared mind”? At least one academic thinks not only that Pasteur was correct, but that it is possible to train minds to be receptive to the subtle signs of chance. This September he will launch a course to do just that.

(Image: Patrick George)

Opinions differ widely as to how frequent a part chance plays in science. “There are not so many stories about serendipity. Basically, you have a couple of dozen, but in the scientific literature over the last 200 years there are so many discoveries from just plain hard work,” says , an innovation researcher at the Arison School of Business in Herzliya, Israel. “If you tried to assess the ratio between serendipity-based discovery and not, I would say less than half a per cent were the result of serendipity. But we like these stories.”

Others think chance’s role is more significant. “Every decent idea I’ve ever had, I had no idea about until I started doing the research and it didn’t turn out the way I expected,” says , a sociologist of science at Cardiff University, UK. If we underestimate the good-luck factor, it could be to do with scale. “I would think little surprises are there often, and big surprises are rarer,” says , a social psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

One reason for the divergent views is the difficulty in defining chance. All of life, after all, is a walk down branching paths, and the direction at each fork often hangs on chance events: having an inspiring science teacher in school, an office mate who happens to know a useful tidbit of information, an experiment that improbably works out well. All of this involves chance; but it doesn’t necessarily mean discoveries happen by chance.

One of the hottest areas of neurobiology, for example, is optogenetics, which allows researchers to control the behaviour of groups of neurons with great precision. While at Stanford University in California, discovered a key technique in the field, the use of light-sensitive proteins from algae to trigger electrical activity in neurons. He and his co-workers (already like-minded – the first stroke of luck) had been thinking for years about using light to control neurons. Then they stumbled across the algal studies (more good luck) and decided to try inserting the genes responsible into mouse cells.

“It kinda worked on the first try,” recalls Boyden, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. “Who would have known that these molecules from algae, which are very different organisms, would work in neurons? That was also serendipitous.” As they later learned, they were even luckier than they knew: the algal protein requires another molecule to work properly, and mammalian brains just happen to produce it for an unrelated reason.

Even so, serendipity was only half the story. Controlling neurons is an idea Boyden and his colleagues were keen on; in Pasteur’s parlance, their minds were “prepared”.

Perhaps the most iconic example of chance in science is Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. In 1928, a stray fungal spore landed in a discarded bacterial culture in his lab at St Mary’s Hospital, London. When Fleming looked at it weeks later, he saw a ring around the growing fungal colony where something had killed the bacteria nearby. That something was eventually identified as penicillin.

Yet Fleming’s finding did not pop out of a vacuum. Other scientists over the preceding century, including Pasteur, had noticed that moulds inhibit bacterial growth. Fleming himself had spent years looking for bacteria-killing compounds and had already found one – lysozyme, an enzyme he isolated . Fleming’s prepared mind connected the dots, but even so, it was another decade before other researchers, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, figured out how to turn the mould into a drug.

Discoveries like these are often called “pseudo-serendipity” – the scientists knew what they were looking for but found the answer in an unexpected place. The writer Arthur Koestler vividly described such finds as “arrivals at the right destination by the wrong boat”. Taken to extremes, this approach can pretty much remove the element of chance from discovery. The inventor Thomas Edison, for example, tested hundreds of materials before he found the right filament for his electric light bulb, and pharmaceutical companies now systematically screen hundreds of thousands of substances looking for new drugs. When such an “Edisonian materials dragnet”, as Gorman puts it, turns up something useful, that’s a testament to hard work more than luck, he says.

In contrast, true serendipity happens when researchers stumble across something entirely unexpected, as in the discovery of microwave heating or Sucralose. Here luck plays a much more obvious role – although every case still needs an alert observer to notice the anomaly, not discount it as an error and turn it into a useful result.

Some examples, though, fall in between. Take the case of the scientist at the chemicals giant 3M who was trying to create a super-strong adhesive but ended up with a super-weak one. Years later, a colleague decided it was just the thing to stop place markers falling out of his hymn book in church. That inspiration spawned Post-it notes.

(Image: Patrick George)

This sort of accident turns out to be fairly common in the annals of innovation. When Goldenberg studied the origin of 200 important inventions, he found that in about half of the cases, the old saying had it backwards: invention was the mother of necessity. “First they found the invention, then they discovered the need,” he says. That makes the final product not exactly an accidental discovery. It’s more a matter of finding the best way to play the hand you’ve been dealt.

“It’s much easier to find a function for an existing form than the other way around,” says Goldenberg. “People are very creative when you have a form.” He points to the example of Vaseline, which has its roots in a dark sludge left over from oil processing. Only when chemists began looking for an application did they discover they could use the purified jelly to help burns heal.

Luck clearly helps some technologies bloom, but its impact on the broader world of scientific discovery is unclear. No one seems to have made a systematic survey of scientific breakthroughs to measure how often chance plays a large part.

Indeed, such a survey may be almost impossible to do properly, says , a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies creativity. Scientific papers may not mention what inspired their findings. Besides, chance may be inextricably intertwined with hard work, making it difficult to weigh the relative contribution of each. “Even if we accept Newton’s falling apple experience as valid, how much of his Principia should be credited to serendipity?” he asks.

Perhaps the most direct attempt to quantify scientific serendipity came two decades ago, when Juan Miguel Campanario of the University of Alcala, Spain, surveyed 205 of the most highly cited scientific papers of the 20th century and found that 17 of them, or 8.3 per cent, contributing to the findings. This probably underestimates the true frequency, however, seeing as not every author is likely to mention their good fortune in print.

Even if there’s little certainty about how common serendipity is in science, there is broad agreement that more of it is a good thing – if only because it leads to more original discoveries. “If you’re working on something where all you have to do is be smart and work hard, chances are somebody’s already found it,” says Boyden. “So we’re often trying to do things to deliberately encourage serendipity.”

Boyden has made something of a cottage industry out of wooing Lady Luck. This autumn he plans to teach a course at MIT on nurturing serendipity, in which he will ask each group of students to systematically set out to revolutionise one area of science. “I think we’ve learned enough now about how to orchestrate serendipity that maybe we should teach it,” he says.

A starting point for having a good idea is to list all possible ones (Image: Image Source/REX Shutterstock)

Boyden’s first rule for making your own luck in research: list all possible ideas to pursue. That’s not as silly as it sounds, he argues. The trick is to subdivide the universe of possibilities into either/or options, and do it over and over again. If you’re looking for a novel way to image the brain optically, for example, you could either detect photons within the brain or wait for them to leave the brain and detect them outside. If you’re doing it within the brain, you could use either active electronics or a passive detector. And so on. He calls this approach a “tiling tree” because it branches like a tree and covers the entire “idea space” like tiles on a floor.

Blue sky’s the limit

In effect, it’s an Edisonian dragnet for ideas. “You can subdivide into smaller and smaller categories, but you never lose any possible ideas. At the very ends of these branches are things you could try out.” That step is where serendipity might appear.

Boyden’s second tip is to range widely. His own research group includes engineers, physicists, neuroscientists, chemists, mathematicians and more. This diversity increases the odds that someone will make an unexpected conceptual connection. In the same vein, it’s good to work on more than one thing at once, as this also boosts the likelihood of cross-pollination. This was a key source of Thomas Edison’s creativity, for example. In a study of the , Simonton found that the more subjects he was working on, the higher his output of patents.

A more controversial way to encourage serendipity, especially discoveries that open whole new fields of science, is simply to find the smartest, most creative thinkers and give them unrestricted funding to get on with it.

That’s what used to happen at legendary research centres like Bell Labs, and still happens to some extent at Google, for example, which allows its engineers to spend 20 per cent of their time on side projects. Back in the 1980s, oil giant BP also funded a blue-skies research initiative with the goal of seeking out the very best scientists and funding them with no strings attached. “I had 13 years of freedom at BP,” recalls , who ran the programme and is now at University College London. “We had 10,000 applicants and I picked just 37,” he says. “Fourteen of those won major breakthroughs.”

That’s a lesson funding agencies still need to heed, says Collins. “It’s difficult to have a policy to encourage serendipity,” he says. “But it’s not difficult to have a policy to discourage it.” Winning research grants is now so competitive – with just 10 per cent of applicants getting funded in many cases – that researchers have to play it safe and go after results they know they can achieve, he says. More adventurous proposals, those that might stumble across something altogether new, tend to be too risky to gain funding.

In essence, today’s system is a self-fulfilling prophecy: it doesn’t believe in chance and so chance discoveries seldom happen. Yet, with some enlightened thought – and a little bit of luck – that could be reversed.

91av‘s latest book Chance is out on 5 November and available to pre-order on .

This article appeared in print under the headline “Get lucky”