Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century (45 page)

We must consider whether the industrialization of invention and discovery has fulfilled the promise of “the endless frontier” of medical science.
²⁷
We must ask whether the yield so far amounts to as much as Robert Noble's chance discovery of the
Vinca
alkaloids for cancer chemotherapy or Barry Marshall's uncovering of the role of H. pylori in ulcers and stomach cancer or Frank Berger's stumbling upon Miltown or Mason Sones entering upon coronary arteriography or Baruch Blumberg's identification of the hepatitis B virus, or McCulloch and Till's unexpected discovery of stem cells. Unfortunately, the conditions that foster serendipitous discovery so rarely exist now.

In one of his famous aphorisms, Yogi Berra quite correctly
pointed out: “If you don't know where you're going, you will wind up somewhere else.” We know that, in many cases, scientists are looking in all the wrong places, and that “somewhere else” is exactly where they need to go. In their attempts at targeted research guided so often by conventional wisdom, they are operating rather like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys beneath the streetlamp because that is where the light is best.

As John Barth wrote in
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor,
“You don't reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously.”
²⁸
The challenge for educational institutions, government policy, research centers, funding agencies, and, by extension, all modern medicine, will be how to encourage scientists to lose their bearings creatively. What they discover may just save our lives!

Acknowledgments

In the course of research for this book, I interviewed several Nobel laureates and winners of other major awards. At SUNY Stony Brook, Chen Ning Yang, Paul Lauterbur, and Arnold Levine provided intimate details of the creative process. Baruch Blumberg, Robert Furchgott, Barry Marshall, Ernest McCulloch, and James Till were candid in acknowledging the role of serendipity in their major discoveries.

I am grateful to others who have given me the benefit of their experience and knowledge: Karl Holubar, Helmut Wyklicky, and Manfred Skopec of the Institute of the History of Medicine and the Josephinum Museum of Medical History, University of Vienna; Kevin Brown, curator of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum at St. Mary's Hospital, London; John Lesch, historian, UC Berkeley; Ernest Hook, professor of public health and pediatrics, UC Berkeley; Martin Blaser, chairman of the Department of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine; Paul Thagard, professor of philosophy and director of the cognitive science program at the University of Waterloo, Canada; SvenIvar Seldinger, the Swedish pioneer in vascular catheterization; Max Fink of Stony Brook's Department of Psychiatry; historian of medicine Marcia Meldrum of UCLA; historian of science Wilbur Apple-baum of the Illinois Institute of Technology; Lawrence K. Altman for an understanding of the motives of self-experimentation in medicine;
Ivar Strang for information on applying for research funding; Robert Moore and Anthony Demsey for aspects of the peer review process and granting mechanisms at the National Institutes of Health; and Alexander Scheeline, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana, for a critical analysis of the flaws in funding programs for scientific research.

My warmest thanks to those who sustained me with encouragement and support: Michiel Feldberg, Nicholas Gourtsoyiannis, Robert Berk, Gerald Friedland, William Thompson, Michael Oliphant, Claus Pierach, Charles J. Hatem, Gerald Reminick, Carol Hochberg Holker, and, not least, Amy, Rich, and Karen Meyers. And of course, throughout, my muse, my wife, Bea.

Many thanks as well to the research librarians at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Science in London, Cambridge University, the Boerhaave Museum of the History of Science and Medicine in Leiden, the New York Academy of Medicine, and my local Emma S. Clark Memorial Library. Most of all in this regard, I am indebted to Colleen Kenefick, senior librarian at the Health Sciences Center at SUNY Stony Brook, who not only tracked the appropriate sources to all my queries but pointed me to other rewarding sources.

Leo Weinstein provided translations of foreign-language publications. Julia Jannen, my archivist, and Susan Simpson, my photo researcher, rendered useful services. Carrie Nichols Cantor helped shape the book's contents. My agent, Joëlle Delbourgo, was the indispensable catalyst for the entire process. My editor at Arcade, Casey Ebro, blended a cheerful personality with an incisive mind; her sharing my enthusiasm in the book's vision was constantly refreshing. My gratitude to my assistant, Alice Jimenez, for her consistent dependability and selfless cooperation.

Notes

I
NTRODUCTION
: Serendipity, Science's Well-Guarded Secret

1. Quoted in Victor Weisskopf,
The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist,
trans. Douglas Worth (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 296–97.

2. L. N. Gay and P. E. Carliner, “The prevention and treatment of motion sickness. I. Seasickness,”
Johns Hopkins Medical Bulletin
84 (1949): 470–87.

3. Kenneth Chang, “Two Americans Win Nobel for Chemistry,”
New York Times,
October 9, 2003.

4. David Anderson, “The Alchemy of Stem Cell Research,”
New York Times,
July 15, 2001.

5. E. C. Kendall, “The crystalline compound containing iodine which occurs in the thyroid,”
Endocrinology
1 (1917): 153–69. As is common with researchers who in time achieve success, it was not until fifty-five years later that Kendall told of his early frustrations with the use of metal tanks. Edward C. Kendall,
Cortisone
(New York: Scribner, 1971), 32–33.

6. Thomas S. Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962/1970).

7. Quoted in J. G. Crowther,
Science in Modern Society
(New York: Schocken, 1968), 363.

8. A. Kantorovich and Y. Ne'eman, “Serendipity as a source of evolutionary progress in science,”
Stud Hist Phil Sci
20 (1989): 505–29. In his 1970 book
Chance and Necessity
(trans. Austryn Wainhouse; New York: Knopf, 1971), Jacques Monod showed by biochemical evidence how all life, including human, stems from the random chance of mutation and the necessity of Darwinian natural selection. Five years earlier, he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with François Jacob and André Lwoff for their work on cellular genetic function.

9. R. S. Root-Bernstein, “Who discovers and who invents?”
Research and Technology Measurement
32 (1989): 43–50.

10. Theodore G. Remer, ed.,
Serendipity and the Three Princes: From the Peregrinaggio of 1557
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).

11. Walter Bradford Cannon,
The Way of an Investigator
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1945).

12. John Godfrey Saxe,
The Blind Men and the Elephant
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).

13. Robert L. Park,
Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172–74.

14. Albert Szent-Györgyi,
Bioenergetics
(New York: Academic Press, 1957), 57.

15. Frank Herbert,
Heretics of Dune
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1984), 368.

16. Author interview with Chen Ning Yang, December 6, 1995.

17. Albert Einstein, preface to
Where Is Science Going?
by Max Planck (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933).

18. Quoted in “Men of the Year,”
Time
77 (1) (1961): 40–46.

19. Quoted in Steven Levy, “Annals of Science: Dr. Edelman's Brain,”
New Yorker,
May 2, 1994, 62–66.

20. Elkhonon Goldberg,
The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older
(New York: Gotham Books, 2005).

21. Timothy D. Wilson,
Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

22. Quoted in W. D. Foster,
A History of Medical Bacteriology and Immunology
(London: Heinemann Medical, 1970).

23. Anne Fadiman,
Ex Libris
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 90–91.

24. Arthur Koestler,
The Act of Creation
(London: Hutchinson, 1964).

25. Aser Rothstein, “Nonlogical factors in research: chance and serendipity,”
Biochemical Cell Biology
64 (1986): 1055–65.

26. Douglas R. Hofstadter, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition,” in
The Best American Science Writing,
ed. James Gleick (New York: Ecco Press, 2000), 116.

27. David Bohm,
On Creativity,
ed. Lee Nichol (London: Routledge, 1998), 7, 15.

28. Francis Darwin, ed.,
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
(London: John Murray, 1888).

29. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne,
Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries
(New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993), 345.

30. Eugene Straus,
Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Laureate
(New York: Plenum, 1998).

31. Lynn Gilbert and Gaylen Moore,
Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times
(New York: Crown, 1981), 44.

32. Richard P. Feynman,
“Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 173–74.

33. Peter Medawar,
Pluto's Republic
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 132.

34. Alan L. Hodgkin, “Chance and design in electrophysiology: An informal account of certain experiments on nerve carried out between 1934 and 1952,”
J Physiol (Lond)
263 (1976): 1–21; Alan Hodgkin,
Chance and Design: Reminiscences of Science in Peace and War
(Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xi.

35. Quoted in Donald G. Mulder, “Serendipity in Surgery,”
Pharos
57, no. 3 (1994): 22–27.

36. Rothstein, “Nonlogical factors in research.”

37. Peter Medawar,
The Limits of Science
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 49.

38. J. H. Humphrey, “Serendipity in immunology,”
Annu Rev Immunol
2 (1984): 14.

39. J. H. Humphrey, “Serendipity and insight in immunology,”
British Medical Journal
293 (1986): 185.

40. Bernard Barber and Walter Hirsch, eds.,
The Sociology of Science
(New York: Free Press, 1962), 525.

41. P. B. Medawar, “Is the scientific paper a fraud?”
Listener,
September 12, 1963, 377–78.

42. Rothstein, “Nonlogical factors in research.”

43. Quoted in Philip Wheelwright, ed.,
The Presocratics
(New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), 70.

44. Medawar,
Pluto's Republic,
287.

Part I:
The Dawn of a New Era: Infectious Diseases and
Antibiotics, the Miracle Drugs

C
HAPTER
1: How Antony's Little Animals Led to the Development of Germ Theory

1. Leeuwenhoek used only a tiny bead of glass often less than 2 mm across as a single biconvex lens mounted between metal plates in a short tube. This was surprisingly small, measuring about one inch by three inches. Yet it achieved magnifying power as high as 500x with resolving power approaching 1 micron. To put that into perspective, compound microscopes used by others provided magnification of about 42x. They were limited optically because of the impure quality of the strong lenses and spherical and chromatic distortions. In addition he probably developed a method of backfield illumination that enabled him to darken the background of his specimen so that light-colored objects being studied stood out more clearly. L. E. Casida Jr., “Leeuwenhoek's Observation of Bacteria,”
Science,
June 25, 1976, 193.

2. The
Transactions
of the Royal Society, which appeared in London in 1664, was the first scientific journal in Europe. Because there were few scientists as such, many of them amateurs, the journal served both professional and popular science. Today it is the oldest scientific journal in continuous publication.