Serendipitous discoveries - a scientific legend

In need of a major scientific breakthrough? Then Russ Swan has an important tip…embrace your inner klutz and go for it! Science has a long and noble history of progress by cock-up, which can be quite reassuring for those of us with a natural ability to blunder through life bouncing from one catastrophe to the next. If, like me, your time at the lab bench is more memorable for a trail of broken glassware and spilled catalysts than for any fundamental new understandings of the workings of the universe, you might take some comfort from the history of disaster turned to triumph. Many of these tales are now the stuff of scientific legend – and probably none more famous than Alexander Fleming's accidental discovery of antibiotics. The story goes that the fungus which yielded the drug we now know as penicillin was noticed after Fleming forgot to place a cover on a petri dish. It's the classic example of the fortuitous lab accident, and the tale loses nothing from the realisation that the antibiotic properties of the same mould had been recorded decades earlier. Our business is littered with examples of great discoveries retrieved from the shards of experiments gone wrong. In fact, they appear so frequently that you might begin to wonder whether there's any value in following a predetermined course of research at all. It also makes me wonder whether the end of scientific progress is within sight, broken on the curse of modern obsessions with health and safety and programmed research. Take the microwave oven, for example. Legend has it that Percy Spencer, a Raytheon researcher, was working on magnetron designs for improved radar when he noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. His investigation into the heating effects of the radiation led to the invention of this essential modern appliance. Can you imagine that scenario today? Any research involving radiation is likely to isolate people behind substantial shielding – in no small part, of course, due to our better appreciation of the dangers that were identified in Spencer's lab. But a chocolate bar? In a laboratory? I can think of a few lab managers that would have a seizure at the very idea. Equally horrifying is the legend of the discovery of the original artificial sweetener. After a day at the lab bench working on coal tar derivatives, Constantin Fahlberg reputedly went for a sandwich and noticed that the bread tasted much sweeter than usual. Subsequent investigations led to the isolation of anhydroorthosulphaminebenzoic acid, commercialised as saccharin. This was over 130 years ago, when life was cheap and the box-ticking culture of health and safety was not even a pipe dream in some overblown underachieving accountant's subconscious, but even so. This guy had the stuff on his fingers, and then in his mouth – rather you than me. You can’t argue that the layers of protection that should eliminate this kind of thing happening today are bad. Despite what we thought we might be getting into when we first dreamed of working in a laboratory, we all appreciate that modern research is very different even from a generation ago. It's safer, yes, but it's also more programmed. Those box-ticking accountants that didn’t become health and safety gestapo turned instead to making us all more 'efficient' by designing-out the potential for error. I fear they have also designed-out the potential for luck. Take that other modern essential, much used in many labs and offices: the sticky note. According to 3M mythology, the semi-sticky glue on a Post-It note was actually the result of an unsuccessful attempt to make a super-strong glue. In many organisations, that failed experiment would be forgotten for ever. Luckily, in this case the knowledge was shared and (after a bit) a hugely successful application was found. Last month a new legend was added to the annals of brilliant cock-ups. Science reported that a new class of thermosetting polymers was identified at IBM's Almaden lab in San Jose, USA, by Jeanette Garcia and others, after they forgot to add one of the three reagents in an experiment. The gunk that formed in the bottom of the flask was unexpected, and reportedly offers the potential for recyclable composites. If this proves to be the case it will be lucky for us, and for them, that the researchers had the time and resources to find out why the planned research had gone 'wrong'. Somebody once said that if you put enough monkeys in front of enough typewriters, eventually one of them will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Maybe, just maybe, if we spent a little less time deciding what the outcomes of research will be before embarking on it, and a bit more time finding out why it's all gone a bit weird, we might make the next truly world-changing discovery. In the meantime, could someone pass me the spill kit? Looks like I've been a bit clumsy again.