Funny, I´ve heard many “happy serendipity” stories from my colleagues, but so far they did not happen to me.

I remember a story of “forgotten” bottle with a solution on the window ledge, where the light rays changed the chemical structure of a substance in such a way that it appeared to be anti-neurodegenerative. Also, false antibodies taken occasionally for staining of western blot gave a signal, although they should not as, according to the literature, the protein should not be expressed in the tissue. After all, high-impact paper came out of it.

I can imagine discoveries in nowadays could be made only by a well-prepared serendipity ;))

2 times in 10 years...

During my first cloning, I amplified 2 unknown isoforms of my gene of interest...

I believe that every scientist has his/her fair share of "accidental procedure deviations". They are more frequent than one could imagine. Although not all will lead to "breakthroughs", many of them could be used to gain new insights into our little fields of expertise.

Whether the scientist "see" the opportunities behind these "unexpected results" and is ready to challenge their own preconceptions to explain them is another thing. Using Serendipity is only up to the well-prepared mind. Unfortunately, far too many of these results are dismissed as "not useful" or "inconvenient " for the given research project so they are duly ignored and buried in the lab notebooks.

Thank you for the answers! But something is wrong here in RG... Despite your responses, my question remains rated as "open" ...

Humm, now it is working well...

Maria, the story of the forgotten bottle is very interesting... Do you know whether was possible to reproduce the effect of light again in order to prepare more solution in a controlled way? Jose, I agree when you say that only well-prepared minds can seize a serendipitous opportunity. I´m always trying to keep my mind open to these events, but up to the present moment I have not been so blessed :- ( Perhaps my mind is not yet sufficiently prepared... Perhaps a serendipitous opportunity can be the result from a subliminar (or unconscious) sequence of acts and thoughts of an individual, which only perceive the final result in the moment of the insight... What do you think?

Dear Walter, perhaps I had to say "I believe that every scientist has his/her fair share of "accidental procedure deviations during their life". May be you're too young or a "late bloomer" statistically speaking :-)

May be we need to discuss if there are some fields more prone to serendipity than others...I guess Maria's answer gives a clue about messy chemists (like me) paving the way to serendipitous discoveries, but may be other disciplines live in a a more controlled -boring?- environment which do not has much serendipity to offer.

I'm digging into the DNA story, from its accidental discovery (1869) to the definition of its structural double helix (1953) ... till the very birth of Biotech. What I clearly see is a constellation of boundedly rational decisions, missed-unpublished discoveries, complex chains of discoveries, rediscoveries, simultaneous discoveries, co-evolving exploitative and explorative behaviors. All dressed with persistence and perseverance of originators, exceptional intellectual courage, and underlying research undiscipline (meaning that more than often researchers refused to follow the existing and well codified research protocols; instead, they put forth their own searching routines). Finally, intellectual migrations among disciplines as strong antecedent of cross-pollinating activities among different collectives.