Showing papers on "Opportunism published in 1948"

Accident and Opportunism in Medical Research

Abstract: My title speaks of accident and opportunism, and it hardly requires to be said that the two must go together if accident is to have any value, if it, indeed, is to be anything but a hindrance to research of any kind. Perhaps it is one of the important qualifications for success in research that a man should know by the subconscious reasoning which we call instinctive judgment whether what appears to be an accident, a phenomenon presenting itself quite unexpectedly, is just a nuisance, the result of some trivial error, so that the further study of it will lead to nothing but waste of time and energy, or whether on the other hand it offers a possible clue to some new discovery of real importance which ought to be followed even at the cost, perhaps, of a diversion from the original objective. The same idea has often been expressed by saying that accidents fruitful in discovery happen only to those who deserve them-to those, we may say, in whom a natural aptitude has been reinforced by stored and ripened experience, so that a trained alertness, which does not distract the attention or weaken its concentration on the chosen objective, holds the mind ready to pounce on an unexpected opportunity. If we were called upon to construct a scale of values for the different kinds of scientific research we might feel bound to accord the highest -rank to the kind of investigation which can be systematically planned in advance, such as one which sets out to interpret by mathematical analysis a set of astronomical or physical data, but accidents of the useful kind have sometimes been effective even in attracting and, as it were, refocusing the attention of some of the greatest of mathematical theorists. You will remember how Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of his own and one of the greatest, I suppose, of all ages, found the clue not only to the solution of the practical problem concerning the adulteration of the gold used for the king's crown but to one of the fundamental laws of hydrostatics in a sufficiently commonplace accident-the overflowing of his bath when he lowered his body into the water. Some nineteen centuries later the young Isaac Newton, driven home to Woolsthorpe from Cambridge by the arrival here of the plague, had been directing his astonishing powers to an attempt to discover a cause for the orbital motion of the moon round the earth and of the planets round the sun. Remembering later those years when he was yet only 23 to 24 years old, he wrote of himself: \" I was in the prime of my age for invention and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since\"; and on that alert and receptive mind the sight of an apple falling from a tree in the Woolsthorpe garden acts like a trigger, and it comes to him in a flash that the