Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

The Accidental ScientistThe Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and theSociology of Science by Robert K. Merton; Elinor BarberReview by: Steven ShapinAmerican Scientist, Vol. 92, No. 4 (JULY-AUGUST 2004), pp. 374-376Published by: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27858429 .

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The Accidental Scientist

In 1733, France sent a team of sci entists to colonial Peru on a

momentous mission: to measure a

degree of longitude near the equator. By comparing this with a degree measured in France, the

academy could put to rest a long standing dispute about the shape of the Earth. Was it flattened at the poles, as Newton argued, or

elongated, as Descartes believed? The team's adventures are

recounted in Robert Whitaker's

meticulously researched The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon (Basic Books, $25). Whitaker captures the voracious

curiosity of the expedition's Enlightenment scientists, "set

loose in a savant's playground." Together they explore South America, catalog its wildlife, docu ment its culture and languages, and scale new heights in the Andes. Voltaire called their success

"a model for all scientific expedi tions to follow."

Whitaker contrasts this with the dark tale of Isabel Godin (shown below), who crossed the continent to rejoin her scientist husband in French Guiana after the expedition. Godin entered the Amazon jungle with a party of 40 and emerged four months later,

exhausted, starving and alone. Her ordeal in the forest highlights the real dangers of colonial explo ration and points up the achieve

ments of what France called "the

greatest expedition the world had ever known."?G.R.

374 American Scientist, Volume 93

Steven Shapin

The Travels and Adventures of

Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Se mantics and the Sociology of Science. Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber,

xxviii + 313 pp. Princeton University Press, 2004. $29.95.

Aparadox lies close to the heart of scientific discovery. If you know just what you are look

ing for, finding it can hardly count as a

discovery, since it was fully anticipat ed. But if, on the other hand, you have no notion of what you are looking for, you cannot know when you have found it, and discovery, as such, is out of the question. In the philosophy of science, these extremes map onto the

purist forms of deductivism and in ductivism: In the former, the outcome is supposed to be logically contained in the premises you start with; in the latter, you are recommended to start

with no expectations whatsoever and see what turns up.

As in so many things, the ideal posi tion is widely supposed to reside somewhere in between these two im

possible-to-realize extremes. You want

to have a good enough idea of what

you are looking for to be surprised when you find something else of val ue, and you want to be ignorant enough of your end point that you can entertain alternative outcomes. Scien

tific discovery should, therefore, have an accidental aspect, but not too much of one. Serendipity is a word that ex

presses a position something like that. It's a fascinating word, and the late Robert King Merton?"the father of the sociology of science"?liked it well

enough to compose its biography, as sisted by the French cultural historian Elinor Barber.

The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity opens with an account of the word's origin. Writing on January 28, 1754, to the British diplomat Sir

Horace Mann, Horace Walpole?an

antiquarian and son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole?boasted about a re

Steven Shapin teaches history of science at Harvard

University and is the author of several booL? about the history of early modern science.

cent discovery he had made in an old book of Venetian arms:

This discovery I made by a talis man, ... by which I find every thing I want, a pointe nomm?e [at the very moment], whenever I dip for it. This discovery, indeed, is al

most of that kind which I call

Serendipity.

As Walpole himself was the author of the term, he felt obliged to give Mann its derivation:

I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip [the ancient name for Ceylon, or Sri Lanka]: as their Highnesses trav elled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and

sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, be cause the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right?now do you understand Serendipity?

The word did not appear in the pub lished literature until the early 19th cen

tury and did not become well enough known to use without explanation until sometime in the first third of the 20th

century. Antiquarians, following Wal

pole, found use for it, as they were al

ways rummaging about for curiosities, and unexpected but pleasant surprises were not unknown to them. Some peo ple just seemed to have a knack for that sort of thing, and serendipity was used to express that special capacity.

The other community that came to dwell on serendipity to say something important about their practice was that of scientists, and here usages cut to the heart of the matter and were often vigor ously contested. Many scientists, includ

ing the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon and, later, the British immunol

ogist Peter Medawar, liked to emphasize how much of scientific discovery was

unplanned and even accidental. One of Cannon's favorite examples of such

serendipity is Luigi Galvani's observa tion of the twitching of dissected frogs'

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legs, hanging from a copper wire, when

they accidentally touched an iron railing, leading to the discovery of "galvanism"; another is Hans Christian Orsted's dis

covery of electromagnetism when he un

intentionally brought a oirrent-carrying wire parallel to a magnetic needle. Rhetoric about the sufficiency of rational method was so much hot air. Indeed, as Meda war insisted in The Art of the Soluble, "There is no such thing as The Scientific Method," no way at all of sys tematizing the process of discovery. Re

ally important discoveries had a way of

showing up when they had a mind to do so and not when you were looking for them. Maybe some scientists, like some book collectors, had a happy knack; maybe serendipity described the situation rather than a personal skill or

capacity. Yet what Cannon and Medawar

took as a benign nose-thumbing at Dreams of Method, other scientists found incendiary. To say that science had a significant serendipitous aspect was taken by some as dangerous deni

gration. If scientific discovery were re

ally accidental, then what was the spe cial basis of expert authority?

In this connection, the aphorism of choice came from no less an authority on scientific discovery than Louis Pas teur: "Chance favors the prepared

mind." Accidents may happen, and

things may turn up unplanned and un

foreseen, as one is looking for some

thing else, but the ability to notice such events, to see their potential bearing and meaning, to exploit their occur rence and make constructive use of them?these are the results of system atic mental preparation. What seems like an accident is just another form of

expertise. On closer inspection, it is in sisted, accident dissolves into sagacity.

But the conjunction of chance and ex

pertise was, indeed, part of Walpole's original definition: The three princes made their discoveries "by accidents and sagacity," and the example of the mule was one that Sherlock Holmes, or Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville, using what the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called "abductive infer ence," would have been proud of. Some scientists using the word meant to stress those accidents belonging to the situation; some treated serendipity as a personal capacity; many others ex

ploited the ambiguity of the notion. Here, as in so many instances, it was

the very equivocality of the word that as

sisted its dispersal across the cultural

landscape, just as one can use the word noble to describe a status by birth (whose members may behave ignobly) or a type of virtuous behavior (which may be manifested by those of ignoble birth). The trade-offs permitted by this ambigu ity are useful: They allow all sorts of claims and contests, criticisms and cele brations. Lots of dictionaries got serendip ity wrong too, if, indeed, one can say that dictionaries do get it wrong: Some forgot the "sagacity" bit; some subsumed the "accident" bit into something like "ge nius"; many, less materially, mangled the

story about Walpole and his source. The context in which scientific

serendipity was most contested and had its greatest resonance was that con nected with the idea of planned science. If you thought that scientific research could be confidently planned?as many

Marxists, and some corporate capitalists and Pentagon functionaries, did?then

you were making a massive bet against serendipity. If, on the other hand, you considered that efforts to organize, regi ment and plan science were ill-advised, then you could recruit serendipity to

your cause. The serendipitists were not all inhabitants of academic ivory tow ers. As Merton and Barber note, two of the great early-20th-century American

pioneers of industrial research?Willis

Whitney and Irving Langmuir, both of General Electric?made much play of

serendipity, in the course of arguing against overly rigid research planning.

Langmuir thought that misconcep tions about the certainty and rationality of the research process did much harm and that a mature acceptance of uncer

tainty was far more likely to result in

productive research policies. For his own part, Langmuir said that satisfac

tory outcomes "occurred as though we were just drifting with the wind. These

things came about by accident." If there is no very determinate relationship be tween cause and effect in research, he said, "then planning does not get us

very far." So, from within the bowels of

corporate capitalism came powerful ar

guments, by way of serendipity, for sci entific spontaneity and autonomy. The notion that industry was invariably committed to the regimentation of sci entific research just doesn't wash.

For Merton himself?who one sup poses must have been the senior au

thor?serendipity represented the key stone in the arch of his social scientific

work. In 1936, as a very young man,

Photographer Rod Morris and

zoologist Alison Ballance treat

readers to a visually rich and

wide-ranging tour in South Sea

Islands: A Natural History (Firefly Books, $35). The package is so attractive, and the message?that isolated archipelagos show the

many vagaries of evolution?is so

forcefully illustrated, that it is easy to turn a blind eye to the occa

sional slipup in the text. What

stickler cares, after all, that

Hawaii, one of the stops on this

13-chapter journey from Fiji to Easter Island, is in the Northern

Hemisphere? What does it matter

that mammals evolved more than 100 million years before the authors say? And so what if the book fails to acknowledge

Wallace and credits Darwin in

unsophisticated ways? It is still full of many splendid details about the plants and animals seen on

these (largely) tropical islands, such as the spectral tarsier from

Sulawesi shown below. And hav

ing so many locales covered

together provides a wonderful sense of the rules by which nature

operates?and the exceptions to

those rules.?D.A.S.

www.americanscientist.org 2004 July-August 375

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Jane Hammerslough's Owl Puke

(Workman, $13.95) imparts new meaning to the phrase "takeout

food." This biology lab in a box, complete with a foil-wrapped ball of owl vomit, a bone-sorting tray and a guidebook detailing the birds' behavioral and culinary habits, should entice the 8- to 12

year-old set. It offers hands-on

exploration of a modern circle of life: Owls eat their prey whole.

Then, in the owl's gizzard, the

indigestible parts (fur and bones) get compressed into "a smooth

package of puke" that is regurgi tated. Fungi, beetles and moths

use this matter for food and shel ter. And entrepreneurs (the guide book informs us) sell it online for $1.65 per pretreated pellet (with a minimum 10-pellet order, please).

Fortunately, there's more to

Owl Puke than a dried ball of vomit. Fully illustrated chapters covering important owl attributes

and predator-prey relationships make the unwrapping of the pel let more meaningful. And young readers with a pair of tweezers, a

magnifying glass and the patience to deal with small rodent bones can have a hoot putting together a skeleton.?ED.

376 American Scientist, Volume 93

Merton wrote a seminal essay on "The

Unanticipated Consequences of Purpo sive Social Action." It is, he argued, the nature of social action that what one intends is rarely what one gets: Intend

ing to provide resources for buttress

ing Christian religion, the natural

philosophers of the Scientific Revolu tion laid the groundwork for secular ism; people wanting to be alone with nature in Yosemite Valley wind up crowding one another. We just don't know enough?and we can never

know enough?to ensure that the past is an adequate guide to the future: Un

certainty about outcomes, even of our best-laid plans, is endemic. All social action, including that undertaken with the best evidence and formulated ac

cording to the most rational criteria, is uncertain in its consequences. As Robert Burns put it, "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft

agley, /An' lea'e us nought but grief an'

pain, /For promis'd joy!" It is a humane vision, and this biog

raphy of serendipity is a humane, learned and very wise book. It was fin

ished in 1958 and lay in Merton's files until just a few years ago. His explana tion that it was put aside as a mere pro logue to another book doesn't carry complete conviction. A plausible alter native is that American academic soci

ology was then well on its way to tak

ing a radically different direction from that represented in this book: less hu

mane, more rationalistic, less con

cerned with the vagaries and contin

gencies of concrete human action, less

willing to attend to voices speaking of

unanticipated consequences, complex ities and, indeed, serendipity.

As his subsequent career illustrates, Merton himself must have had am bivalent feelings about these differ ences in sociological sensibilities: Sci entism pulled him in one direction, humanism in another; and in the sub

sequent decades, scientism exerted the

stronger pull. Perhaps Merton felt that the time for such a book had passed. It is a pity that we had to wait so long for it, since The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity is the great man's greatest achievement. |

Venal Combat

Paul Rabinow

The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. James Shreeve. + 403

pp. Knopf, 2004. $26.95.

The completion of the sequencing of the human genome was by any standard a technological tri

umph and a scientific landmark. It was

widely publicized as a "race," al

though exactly what it meant to com

plete the task was never made very clear. But the race turned out to be, in a sense, rigged: Ultimately, political in tervention at the highest levels ensured

Paul Rabinow is a professor of anthropology at the

University of California, Berkeley. He is the author

of many books, including French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and the forthcoming (with Talia Dan-Cohen) A

Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles

(Princeton University Press, 2004), about the

founding and work of Celera Diagnostics, which is a joint venture between the Applied Biosystems

Group and Celera Genomics Group of Applera

Corporation.

that the competitors would cross the finish line together, allowing President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair to come together at the Rose Garden in

June 2000 to celebrate the achievement. Who were the competitors in this

supposed contest? There were two: A

public consortium?which grouped the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the

Department of Energy, multiple uni

versity laboratories receiving federal

grants to carry out the sequencing work, the world's largest philanthropy (the Wellcome Trust in Britain) and smaller publicly funded genome pro jects from the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany and China?was pit ted against Celera Genomics, a biotech

company in Rockville, Maryland. Francis Collins, codiscoverer of "the

cystic fibrosis gene" (for which he shared a patent), represented the pub lic effort as director of the NIH Hu

man Genome Project. Craig Venter, an

outspoken maverick and chief scien tific officer of Celera Genomics,

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