Happy Accidents summary

The first person to observe the millions of tiny organisms that rule our world — the germs, bacteria and protozoa — was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a businessman and self-taught Dutch scientist in the late 1700s, who had made a hobby of building microscopes. Leeuwenhoek set out to find out what makes pepper hot. He assumed that peppercorns had tiny sharp spikes on their surfaces, and instead discovered thousands of "miniscule animals."

While Leeuwenhoek played an invaluable role in discovering and classifying the first bacteria, he didn't grasp their significance for human health. In the late nineteenth century, Frenchman Louis Pasteur confirmed that such microorganisms were the cause of many common diseases. He and German scientist Robert Koch transformed bacteriology into a respectable medical discipline. Koch, for his part, discovered the bacteria that cause typhoid, gonorrhea, pneumonia, and many other diseases. 

In 1928, a shy Scottish bacteriologist by the name of Alexander Fleming made a discovery that would change medicine forever. 

At that time, Fleming was working with cultures of Staphylococcus aureus collected from boils, abscesses, and other nasty infections. Often reprimanded by his colleagues for being messy, Fleming had a habit of letting used petri dishes pile up on his work desk. One day, when he returned to his London lab after a few days away, he found that one of them had been contaminated by a mold. 

On December 2, 1943, at the height of WWII, the German Luftwaffe conducted a fateful air raid on the allied ships stationed at the harbor in Bari, Italy. 

The raid itself lasted only 20 minutes, but as each ship’s explosion ignited the others – hundreds of men died in the fire. Others, trying to escape, threw themselves into the Adriatic sea. 

For a long time, doctors considered the human heart and its main arteries inviolable by surgery. Ever since the nineteenth century, when German scientists Albert von Kölliker and Heinrich Müller accidentally discovered how the heart muscle uses electrical activity to pump blood, medicine had continued to gain great insight into the workings of the heart. But as late as the 1950s, doctors still considered it too dangerous to directly interfere with this delicate, vital instrument or its direct blood supply. 

This was unfortunate, because in the early twentieth century, it became increasingly clear that heart disease was one of America’s number one killers. Even today, as many as 17 percent of the adult US population have some form of heart condition. 

Perhaps no other medical field has so obviously benefitted from inadvertent side effects of wholly unrelated drugs as psychopharmacology — the science of chemicals meant to alter our mood and behavior.

Thorazine, for example, a drug that dramatically reduces symptoms of schizophrenia, was discovered in the 1950s, as part of a hunt for antihistamines. Two other major discoveries in psychopharmacology, Lithium and antidepressants, were chanced upon in similar serendipitous fashion. 

Stomach ulcers are a nasty yet surprisingly common condition that currently affects about five million Americans. An ulcer is essentially an open sore in the stomach lining that can cause chronic gastritis, inflammation, and pain. 

For a long time, ulcers were believed to be caused by an overproduction of stomach acid due to stress, tobacco consumption, or diet. Infamous therapies such as the “Sippy diet” advised people to consume nothing but eggs, milk, and cream in a vain attempt to lower their levels of stomach acid.

As the previous blinks have illustrated, many essential medical discoveries in the past century happened by accident. Pursuing one path or following a completely wrong hypothesis, scientists came across other, unexpected findings, and turned those surprises into invaluable medical knowledge.

In the past 20 years, there’s been a marked decline in such serendipitous discoveries. The reason for this is that the landscape of medical research has transformed dramatically.