The three princes of Serendip - Notes on a mysterious phenomenon

The word "serendipity" was entered into the lexicon by Horace Walpole in 1754. He had become intrigued with a Persian fairytale in which three princes of Serendip, (now Sri Lanka) traveled the world, "making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of..." Walpole proposed the new word, but then went on to give rather mundane examples of its meaning. It is only recently that serendipity has acquired its rather grand and mysterious significance. The Oxford English Dictionary defines serendipity as "the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident." Serendipity plays an important part in research of all kinds, but it operates only in a special environment; as Pasteur famously stated, "Chance favors the prepared mind." In research, what serendipity really means in practical terms is that scientists discover things in the course of their investigations that they were not looking for. And these new findings are often not the products of cold logic. Sometimes, great discoveries are made because of a serendipitous situation or observation. One excellent example of a serendipitous observation which led to a great discovery occurred in 1922, when Alexander Fleming, suffering from a particularly juicy cold, happened to sneeze into a Petri dish full of bacteria. He absent-mindedly placed the dish on his cluttered desk. Some days later, as he was straightening his desk, he noticed to his great surprise that the bacteria in the dish had been destroyed. His curiosity was aroused, and following his nose (so to speak), he worked to isolate for the first time the "active principle" lysozyme the antibacterial protein found in tears and mucus. Convinced that more potent agents might exist, Fleming began searching for other environmental antibacterials, eventually coming up in 1928 with penicillin, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1945. He shared the prize with Florey and Chain, who made the mass administration of the drug to humans practical. In his characteristic understated manner (he was after all the son of a Scottish farmer), Fleming commented,