Serendipity in Science: 50+Years of Designed, and Sometimes Lucky, Science

Normal science is about assessing what is already known about a topic, about what needs to be known, and careful methods to collect the data required to answer the scienti fi c question. It is the mainstay of scienti fi c progress. But sometimes, luck or chance (eg, serendipity) plays a signi fi cant role in scienti fi c process. We trace career experiences in our lives to show how serendipity, the gift that Mother Nature gives to science, has a nontrivial role in scienti fi c progress and professional careers. This gift often encourages us to change the focus of experiments or to look for the answers to our questions in ways that were not immediately obvious.