Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs PDF

Rating: (14 reviews) Author: Morton A. Meyers ISBN : 9781559708456 New from $3.91 Format: PDF

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What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, antidepressants, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, found in the search for something else. Winston Churchill once said, ÒMen occasionally stumble across the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.Ó Happy accidents take place every day, but it requires intelligence, insight, and creativity to recognize a ÒEureka!Ó moment when it occurs, and to know what to do next.

Drawing on personal experience, research, and interviews with winners of the Nobel Prize and other prestigious awards, Morton A. Meyers uncovers the surprising role of serendipity in four major fields of medical advancesÑinfectious disease, cancer, heart disease, and mental disorders. He exposes the factors that stifle innovation and proposes steps to foster a more creative approach to science. It may just save our lives!

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• Paperback: 390 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (December 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155970845X
• ISBN-13: 978-1559708456
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds

Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs PDF

Let me preface my remarks by mentioning that I am a practicing radiologist and I also serve as Editor in Chief for the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), a scholarly, scientific journal that has been in existence for more than 100 years.

In 1995, an article titled "Science, Creativity, and Serendipity" by Morton A. Meyers was published in the AJR [1]. This was the Glen W. Hartman Lecture of the Society of Gastrointestinal Radiologists of that year. The AJR's Editor at that time, Robert Berk, believed it to be one of the most outstanding papers published during his tenure and commented that "Residents will be fortunate to have this information at the beginning of their careers" (M. A. Meyers, personal communication). Fortunately for us, Dr. Meyers has maintained a continuing interest in the role of serendipity as it applies to major medical breakthroughs, and he published a book on this very topic in March 2007, titled "Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs--When Scientists Find What They're NOT Looking For" [2].

It was my good fortune recently to pick up Dr. Meyers' book and casually begin to leaf through it. To my astonishment, almost everything important in medicine that has developed over the past two centuries came about, to a large extent, through pure serendipity. The book is divided into four parts. Let me list them here in order so you can appreciate Dr.

[...]

The Birth Stochastic Science: Rewriting the History of Medicine

Controlled experiment can easily show absence of design in medical research: you compare the results of top-down directed research to randomly generated discoveries. Well, the U.S. government provides us with the perfect experiment for that: the National Cancer Institute that came out of the Nixon "war on cancer" in the early 1970s.

"Despite the Herculean effort and enormous expense, only a few drugs for the treatment of cancer were found through NCI's centrally directed, targeted program. Over a twenty-year period of screening more than 144,000 plant extracts, representing about 15,000 species, not a single plant-based anticancer drug reached approved status. This failure stands in stark contrast to the discovery in the late 1950s of a major group of plant-derived cancer drugs, the Vinca Alcaloids -a discovery that came about by chance, not through directed research."

From Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs, by Morton Meyers, a book that just came out. It is a MUST read. Please go buy it. Read it twice, not once. Although the author does not take my drastic "stochastic tinkering" approach, he provides all kind of empirical evidence for the role of design. He does not directly discuss the narrative fallacy(q.v.) and the retrospective distortion (q.v.) but he certainly allows us to rewrite the history of medicine.

We did not realize that cures for cancer had been coming from other brands of research. You search for noncancer drugs and find something you were not looking for (and vice versa). But the interesting constant:

a- The discoverer is almost always treated like an idiot by his colleagues.