Happy Accidents

Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs Paperback – April 18, 2011

Author: Visit Amazon's Morton A. Meyers Page | Language: English | ISBN: 1611453798 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs – April 18, 2011
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From Publishers Weekly

Meyers, professor emeritus of radiology and internal medicine at SUNY–Stony Brook, has a simple message: the most significant breakthroughs in medical research usually came about when people were looking for something else entirely. Lithium's effect on bipolar disorder, for example, was discovered because a scientist was taking advantage of its solubility to run toxicity tests on patients. Likewise, Viagra was developed during experiments on medications designed to treat angina. Meyers has dozens of stories like this, in the areas of antibiotics, cancer treatments, cardiovascular therapy and antidepressants. The anecdotes are lively and filled with miniportraits of important doctors like Paul Ehrlich (who pioneered the use of chemistry to develop medical treatments) and Arthur Voorhees (who stumbled onto the treatment for abdominal aortic aneurysms), but some chapters feel forcefully wedged in. The role of accident in creating the thalidomide molecule is glossed in one sentence, and too little information is given about contemporary research into the therapeutic use of LSD to draw any meaningful conclusions (although it's a good excuse to revisit the story of Albert Hofmann's bicycle ride). But it will be hard to argue with Meyers's criticism of a rigid scientific culture that discourages experimenters from keeping an eye out for the unexpected. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

To radiologist and internist Meyers, the phrase creative scientific research has become an oxymoron in today's culture of research grants, peer review boards, pharmaceutical companies, overly regimented education, and scientific journals. Rebuffing all that, he details dozens of medicines currently saving millions of lives that are the results of serendipity, which he defines as "chance plus judgment"--medicines discovered while researchers were looking in quite another, often the opposite, direction. To be serendipitous, he says, a chance discovery must be accompanied by the researcher's "ability to recognize an important anomaly or to draw analogies that are not obvious." Creativity is key. In interviews with several Nobel laureates, many readily admit applying so-called post facto logic to the sequence of their reasoning when they make their presentations because, Meyers notes, getting to a new idea is not a linear process. Meyers' accounts of such happy accidents as the discoveries of the lifesaving anticoagulant Coumadin, the manic-depression therapeutic lithium, and others is a significant brief on creativity's critical role in medical research. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Books with free ebook downloads available Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs – April 18, 2011

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1 edition (April 18, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1611453798
• ISBN-13: 978-1611453799
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,807,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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.

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