Serendipity, penicilin and the prepared mind
Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicilin is a classic example of serendipitous discovery.
"Fleming kept a messy lab. He left petri dishes, microbes and nearly everything else higgledy-piggledy on his lab benches, untended. One day in September of 1928, Fleming returned from a trip and found a goop of some sort growing into a stack of abandoned bacterial cultures and killing them. The circle of goop was a fungus. In that chance moment, Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin, properties that would change the world."
Let's test the theory of the prepared mind favoring chance:
- How was Fleming's mind "prepared"? He liked to paint. "He produced [...] paintings by growing microbes with different natural pigments in the places where he wanted different colors." That made him highly sensitive to shapes and colors in Petri dishes and gave him an ability to detect outliers.
- What was Fleming's "chance generator"? He kept a messy lab! And he liked to inject additional messiness: "Fleming one day hung his nose over a petri dish so to allow his mucus to drip on to the plate. He wanted to see what would happen, what observation would grow out of that strange planting. A new color? A new life form? What he found instead was that his mucus killed bacteria. He had discovered, or he would go on to anyway, lysozyme, a common natural antibiotic that most bodies produce in great quantities. "
Happy accidents, the defining elements of serendipity, only exist at the intersection of (cultivated) randomness and the prepared mind's ability to detect them.
PS: Incredibly, this article ends with the sentence: "In such moments, the prepared mind favors chance rather than the other way around."