Unexpected Scientific Discoveries Are Often The Most Important

Today's scientists are often forced into playing a game with Catch-22 rules to obtain support for their research. Commonly, they are expected to submit a proposal stating what it is that they hope to discover before they can be awarded a research grant to discover it.

You can ask fiction writers what their next book will be about, and the chances are that they will be able to provide you with a pretty good idea of what the outcome will be. But to ask a scientist what his or her next discovery will be is to misinterpret the scientific method. Of course, it is possible for experienced scientists to plot the latest trends in their field and to anticipate where the next discovery is likely to be made (or, more important, where it needs to be made).

But searching for something you expect to find robs science of some of its mystique. Worse, it can lead the workers down narrow corridors and cause them to miss a gem hidden in the corner. Unfortunately, writing detailed proposals for research grants in the modern world allows little leeway for following one's nose, as was the expected modus operandi of scientists in less structured times.

Let's review just a few of the important discoveries of the past couple of centuries that were made entirely by chance.

In 1791 Luigi Galvani was an anatomist at the University of Bologna. Galvani was investigating the nerves in frog legs, and had threaded some legs on copper wire hanging from a balcony in such a way that a puff of wind caused the legs to touch the iron railing. A spark snapped and the legs jerked violently (even today, we speak of being "galvanized" into action). In one unintended step, Galvani had observed a closed electrical circuit, and related electricity to nerve impulses.

In 1879, Louis Pasteur inoculated some chickens with cholera bacteria. It was supposed to kill them, but Pasteur or one of his assistants had accidentally used a culture from an old jar and the chickens merely got sick and recovered. Later, Pasteur inoculated them again with a fresh culture that he knew to be virulent, and the chickens didn't even get sick. Chance had led him to discover the principle of vaccination for disease prevention.

Wilhelm Roentgen was experimenting with electrical discharges one evening at the University of Wurzburg in 1895. There was a screen coated with a barium compound lying to one side, and Roentgen noticed that it would fluoresce when an electrical discharge would occur in the tube he was watching. On reaching for the screen, Roentgen got his hand between the discharge tube and the screen and saw the bones of his own hand through the shadow of his skin. In 1901, Roentgen received the Nobel prize for his accidental discovery of X-rays.

Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist at St. Mary's Hospital in London in 1928. One day in his cluttered laboratory, he noticed that a culture dish of bacteria had been invaded by a mold whose spore must have drifted in through an open window. Under the microscope, he saw that, all around the mold, the individual bacteria that he had been growing had burst. He saved the mold, and from it produced the first penicillin.

Science has coined the phrase, "the Principle of Limited Sloppiness" to describe fortuitous or accidental discoveries such as these. Maybe their time has passed. Certainly, there is no place in, say, the space program for "limited sloppiness."

Although the mad scientists or eccentric inventors so often portrayed in old movies are still good for laughs, that's not what we're talking about here. Surely the need still exists for the imaginative, the inventive, and the unshackled experimenter.