Success from serendipity and science

By Associate Professor Allan Blackman

This article was orignally published in the Otago Daily Times on Monday 3 March 2003.

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For those reading this over a large plate of bacon and eggs, how many of you realise that you're benefiting from one of the most famous accidental discoveries in chemistry?

It is 65 years since the discovery of Teflon, a polymer that stops your bacon and eggs sticking to the frying pan and immortalised in the Guinness Book of Records as the slipperiest known substance.

Teflon was discovered in 1938 by Dr Roy Plunkett and his technician Jack Rebok in the laboratories of chemical manufacturer DuPont.

These researchers did not actively set out to prepare Teflon — in fact, they were studying the properties of a newly prepared fluorocarbon gas to assess its suitability for potential use as a non-toxic refrigerant.

This gas was stored in high-pressure cylinders and Plunkett and Rebok's great stroke of good fortune came when they couldn't get any gas out of a supposedly full cylinder.

Initially, they thought the cylinder was defective and that the gas had slowly leaked out, but on weighing the apparently empty cylinder they found it to be the same weight as a full one.

Intrigued by this, they decided to cut the cylinder in half (do NOT try this at home!) and, to their surprise, they found a slippery white powder inside.

Thus was Teflon discovered.

Artificial sweeteners also have a serendipitous history.

The sweetness of saccharin was first noticed in 1879 by Constantine Fahlberg, at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, after he spilled a solution of saccharin on his hand and noticed a sweet taste when he licked his fingers later that day during dinner.

In 1937, Michael Sveda, a graduate student studying anti-fever drugs at the University of Illinois, put his cigarette down on the laboratory bench where he was working and found that it tasted sweet when he put it back in his mouth. This observation led to the development of cyclamate.

One wonders what Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) would have to say about smoking in the lab today.

Jim Schlatter, a chemist at Searle Chemical Company, was preparing new drugs for the relief of gastric ulcers when he too, licked his fingers after working in the lab and noticed the sweet taste of aspartame, or Nutrasweet, as it is now commercially known.

Perhaps the most bizarre story involves the foreign student who misunderstood his English supervisor's instructions to test the compound and thought he was meant to taste it. Sucralose was the result.

All of the above discoveries have one thing in common — they were unplanned.

In each case, the workers were involved in research completely unrelated to their big discovery.

And, in each case, the workers were able to recognise the importance of their serendipitous discovery and develop it into a commercially successful product.

Science funding today doesn't really allow for serendipitous discoveries. Grant application forms require detailed descriptions of the proposed projects complete with anticipated outcomes and outputs.

This goes against the very nature of science — if you know what the answer is going to be before you start, then why bother starting?

It is usually the unexpected results that end up changing the world, not the narrowly-focused, rigidly-defined projects that funding agencies seem to prefer.

Of course, scientists cannot and do not rely on serendipity alone, but it is vitally important that basic "blue skies" science be adequately funded, for who knows what great discovery might be just around the corner?

And here's a question for you to mull over while you're finishing your bacon and eggs — if Teflon is so slippery, how do they get it to stick to the pan?