The author of this excursion, Sheldon Lee Glashow, is old
(emeritus professor at both Harvard and Boston University)
He also has one of those Nobel thingies. (physics, 1979)
From the (possibly) resurrected Inference Review:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but: ‘That’s funny...’
—Isaac Asimov
Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in a letter to Horace Mann. The two men had become friends during Walpole’s Grand Tour of Europe in 1739. Walpole returned to England a year later while Mann remained in Florence as Britain’s permanent envoy, a position he secured with assistance from Walpole’s father. The two men never met again but corresponded for forty-six years.
In one of his letters, Walpole wrote:
I once read a silly fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. As their highnesses traveled they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest for: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side where it was worse than on the right — now do you understand serendipity?
The Travels and Adventures of the Three Princes of Serendip first appeared in a fourteenth century Persian poem by Amir Khusrau. The mule that Walpole recalled from childhood had actually been a one-eyed lame camel, driven by a woman and laden with bags of butter and honey. Given these clues, the prince deduced the path the lost camel had taken. The camel was found, the princes richly rewarded. The tale was translated from Persian to Italian in 1557, from Italian to French in 1619, and then to English in 1721. The story of the wayward one-eyed camel may be traced back to the sixth century Talmud, the princes replaced by Jewish slaves, the butter and honey, by wine and oil.
The Abecedary
A is for the first aniline dye, stumbled upon in 1856 by the 18-year-old English chemist Henry Perkin whose German tutor asked him to synthesize quinine from coal tar. Perkin ended up with a dirty brown sludge. After cleaning his beaker with alcohol, he noticed that the sludge had turned purple. Patented and marketed as Perkin’s Mauve, it was exhibited publicly by Empress Eugénie thereby becoming highly fashionable and making Perkin rich. His tutor synthesized another aniline dye, magenta, and helped to create the huge German dye industry. Sir William Henry Perkin was knighted in 1906 and quinine itself was first synthesized in 1944, just in time for its use in World War II. Mauve was not alone among serendipitous synthetic dyes: Prussian blue was accidentally hit upon in 1706, Scheele’s Green in 1775, Monastral blue in 1927, Pyrrole red in 1974, and Yin Mn blue in 2009. Serendipity comes in many colors.
B is for Botox. The powerful toxin produced by botulism bacteria was introduced to medicine by Alan B. Scott. His experimental drug, a form of the toxin later called Botox, was approved in 1989 for treating eye muscle problems, but often found off-label targets such as migraine headache or urinary incontinence. Its bonanza application arose by chance when Jean Carruthers saw her patient’s facial wrinkles vanish after treating her with Botox. For years she and her husband explored the many cosmetic applications of Botox. Once approved for such purposes, Botox became a multi-billion dollar drug, but the Carrothers had neglected to patent its cosmetic use.
C is for Cisplatin, the trade name for a chemical first synthesized in 1844 and called Peyrone’s salt. A century later, the American chemist Barnett Rosenberg set out to explore the effect of electricity on bacterial growth by sending electric currents through media containing live bacteria. Noticing that the cells stopped dividing, Rosenberg hoped that electricity might be used to treat cancer, but the suppression of cell division had resulted from a compound produced at their platinum electrodes. Rosenberg identified Peyrone’s salt as the most effective such platinum compound. Cisplatin arrived at clinics in 1978 to treat testicular and ovarian cancers. It is often used off label for other cancers. Cisplatin, along with several other platinum-based drugs, account for about forty percent of all effective chemotherapeutic agents.
D is for Dynamite, devised by Alfred Nobel in 1867. Two decades earlier, Ascanio Sobrero had created the liquid explosive nitroglycerine. Due to its instability, he could find no practical use for it. Nobel sought a material that could absorb nitroglycerine thereby yielding a stable solid that could safely be shaped, transported and triggered. He tried many materials – sawdust, cement, charcoal – but with no success. The serendipity of Nobel’s discovery lay in his fortuitous use of sand from dunes near his lab as his absorbent material – not the sand of ocean beaches nor that used to make concrete or fill children’s sandboxes, but kieselguhr, a diatomaceous earth made of ancient fossilized organisms. You can buy it as a health food or an insecticide and it gave rise to Nobel’s prize-creating discovery. Incidentally, symptoms often reported by nitroglycerine workers led to its serendipitous use to treat angina. Late in life Nobel was prescribed nitroglycerine pills for heart disease.
E is for chemical elements discovered more or less by chance. Nine of the prenuclear ninety-two elements qualify: Helium, Phosphorus, Oxygen, Argon, Iodine, Yttrium, Lanthanum, Praseodymium and Neodymium. Three more are found among the twenty-six transuranic elements: Neptunium, Einsteinium and Fermium. Phosphorus was discovered by alchemist Hennig Brand in 1669. He found it by distilling urine in quest of the Philosopher’s Stone. Three centuries later phosphorus bombs helped destroy his hometown of Hamburg. Lanthanum and didymium were chanced upon in 1840 when Carl Mosander tried to purify cerium. Both were regarded as elements and included in Mendeleev’s Table, but forty-five years later Carl von Weisbach was amazed to find didymium to be an alloy of two new elements, which he named Praseodymium and Neodymium....
....MUCH MORE
Previously from Inference Review:
Disease, Famine, Drudgery, Bondage: A Lively Look at the Birth of the Modern
Not that kind of bondage. Not that lively a look, sorry.
Refunds available at the entrance.
"Reviewing Mervyn King's The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy"
"The Euro Is Doomed"
Lo and Behold: Andrew Lo's Adaptive Markets
"The Subjective Statistician"
Review: "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century"
One Euro, One Europe (One Love)
When France Invented The Internet
Tribes and States: Human Self-Organization
"The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World"Emanuel Derman: "Trading Volatility"
The BIS and the Rise of Secular Stagnation
The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World
Economics: "The Miracle of General Equilibrium"
In response to 'At Lunch with Freeman Dyson': "Escape from the Prisoner’s Dilemma"
And many more. Use the 'search blog' box upper left, if interested.
