The Accidental Scientist. The Role of Chance and Luck in Scientific Discovery

152 Pages·2013·4.84 MB·English

by  Graeme Donald

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2013
All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available
this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person
who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78243-015-5 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-009-5 in EPub format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-100-8 in Mobipocket format
Cover design by Ana Bjezancevic
Designed and typeset by Envy Design Ltd
Picture research by Judith Palmer
www.mombooks.com
For Rhona, my own personal gift from
the Princes of Serendip
Contents
Introduction

Botox
DNA Fingerprinting
Cellulose
Synthetic Dyes
Mustard Gas
Penicillin
Catseyes
The Microwave Oven
Darwin: The Accidental Tourist
Pavlov’s Dog
Post-it Notes
A Cure for Scurvy
Nitroglycerin
The Telephone
Lobotomies
Thalidomide
Radiation Exposure
The Cellphone
Starlite
Pykrete
A Shipment of Uranium
Punch-card Machines
LSD
The Frozen Experiment

Bibliography
Picture Credits
Index
Introduction
ACKNOWLEDGED AS ONE of the most difficult words to translate into any other
language, serendipity – as a word and a concept – was invented by Horace
Walpole, son of Robert Walpole (who is broadly recognized as Britain’s first
Prime Minister, despite that office not existing until 1937 – all previous
incumbents being formally titled First Lord of the Treasury; but we digress).
Horace was inspired by the ancient tale of The Three Princes of Serendip – the
old name of Sri Lanka – which tells of many discoveries and situations
successfully resolved by chance or blunder, as indeed has been the case
throughout the history of science and medicine.
Take, for example, the discovery of PTFE, better known today as Teflon.
Although non-stick pans are cynically and wrongly said to be the only benefit
accorded the general population by the space programme, the substance was in
fact discovered by chance in 1938 by Du Pont’s Roy Plunkett while he was
working on refrigerants. A cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas failed to
discharge, despite the fact that its weight indicated that it was full. At this point
most would have simply grabbed another cylinder, but not Plunkett, who cut the
cylinder in half to see what was going on. The inside was coated with a white
deposit indicating the gas to have polymerized. This white deposit has meant
omelettes have been easier to cook ever since.
Sticking with the American space programme, serendipity can also work in
reverse, chronologically speaking. In 1962, NASA was struggling to design the
spacesuits that, in 1969, would be worn by the first men on the moon. In a
chance conversation, one of the team was correcting a colleague who had trotted
out the old myth about armour being so heavy that knights had to be hoisted onto
horses by small cranes. While lecturing his teammates on the lightness and
flexibility of such suits that in fact rarely weighed more than 50lb, it dawned on
all present that the answer to their problem might lie in the past. The team flew
hot-foot to the UK to visit the armouries at the Tower of London and
subsequently modelled their famous moon attire on a suit of armour made for
Henry VIII to fight on foot in knightly contests. The secret lay in the articulation
of all the joints, which allowed for full radial movement. Today, visitors to the
Tower can still see the moonsuit sent from America in gratitude, standing aside
its historical inspiration.
There are, of course, many more examples of serendipitous discovery than
those included in the following pages – even the recreation drug ecstasy evolved
from a 1953 search for a truth-drug conducted by the US Army – but everyone
involved in the project hopes you enjoy the stories laid out in The Accidental
Scientist and will perhaps be encouraged to seek out more examples. (Actually, I
wanted to call it Serendipity-Do-Dah but they put the block on that pretty
smartish.)
Botox
TOXINS CAN BE FUNNY THINGS; some, like snake venom, which is little more than
a modified enzyme that pre-digests the snake’s prey, are lethal if administered
intravenously yet can be ingested without harm. Others, like botulism, can be
lethal if ingested yet benign or even beneficial if injected – under the right
conditions.
Usually associated in the general mind with contaminated meat, Clostridium
botulinum is also pandemic in the soil and finds low-acid vegetables, such as
asparagus, an ideal host; most dangerous of all is the humble baked potato if
wrapped in baking foil after cooking and then left at ambient temperature. The
first to suspect the existence of this toxin was the German poet/physician
Justinus Kerner (1786–1862) who, in his home town of Württemberg in 1817,
traced an outbreak of such food poisoning to a batch of boiled sausage and so
named the culprit from the Latin botulus, a ‘sausage’. Such outbreaks were far
more common in Württemberg than in other towns and cities, an anomaly
Kerner speculated might be due to the local habit of slow and low temperature
boiling to reduce the likelihood of the sausage bursting; furthermore, although he
had no idea as to the nature of the agent, he was the first to speculate on possible
medical uses. But it would be a chance invitation to, of all things, a funeral,
seventy-eight years later, that cracked the matter.