The result didn't exactly translate into fame and fortune, although it did get me a sit-down with Francis Crick before he died. I'm quite sure he thought I was an idiot, but at least his English manners repressed him from saying so.
The point being, Science is no stranger to serendipity. A list of famous accidental discoveries, which I created using my extensive knowledge of science history and not at all by cutting and pasting something I found on Wall Street Insider Weekly, includes: X-rays, microwave ovens, the pacemaker, quinine, radioactivity, penicillin, viagra, insulin, dynamite, saccharin, anesthesia, and the nine best ramen spots in NYC. (Aside: It's rather amusing to read technical blurbs written by business majors. Their summaries come perilously close to resorting to terminology like "nulecules.")
There's lots of stuff we can add to this list that would mean nothing to the average punter but were blind luck nonetheless (e.g., the thingy I opened with). The larger point is all this seems at odds with the popular notion of research. Wherefore the scientific method? you may be asking, the crumbling of your beloved worldview causing improper usage of Shakespearian lingo. Were you to waltz into our laboratory after somehow slipping past the armed guards (medical schools are invariably located in a bad part of town) would you not find us at the bench carefully checking off a printed list of standard milestones in hushed tones as we titrate or microscopulate or do whatever the heck it is we do with our fat government cash?
Perhaps you believe nerds receive a Scientific Method tattoo at the conclusion of our smartification process, or have it embroidered on a throw pillow or burned into our forearms like Kung Fu when he left the monastery in Kung Fu.
Well, if you believe any of that, I'm afraid I have some bad news.
Alas, along with unicorns, rustproofing, and democracy, the scientific method is something that only exists in fiction. Oh sure, there's probably a Wikipedia page on it (hold on... yep). Reading that would spoil the surprise, so let me write down my version. We could compare notes after, but we probably won't.
The Scientific Method, as told by a Working Scientist
1. Formulate a hypothesis.
2. Lunch.
3. Come home to dark apartment after spending 36 hours in the lab. SO is not speaking to you.
4. Drink.
5. Return to lab. Wonder why equipment isn't working.
6. Grade papers. Go to journal club talk that has nothing to do with anything, but if you don't go the department chair gets testy.
7. Spend four hours in a mandatory NIH ethics course. Today we learned buying snow tires off your grant is frowned upon.
8. Return to bench. Think about hypothesis.
9. Prepare experiment. Is the equipment on fire?
9b. The equipment is on fire.
9c. Talk to vendor. It's not their fault.
10. Go to Purchasing and beg permission to buy a new gronkulator. It's like visiting the Event Horizon. Purchasing says I will not need eyes where we are going.
11. New gronkulator has arrived by FedEx. It sits on the loading dock until 5 PM because Receiving didn't bother to call.
12. Hammer time. Everyone has gone home; there is now a 12-hour window to get results.
13. Here comes the sun.
14. Sleep.
15. Data analysis. The files are all empty. Apparently the new gronkulator has a little-endian Zilog controller which didn't know how to talk to the A/D card and Windows decided I didn't need to know about the bus errors it was throwing all night.
16. Drink.
Mostly, a successful day in the lab is one in which your equipment doesn't maim or kill you. It's a right wonder humankind isn't still living in caves and throwing poop at one another. And yet, somehow out of this chaos we invented electricity and solved smallpox. Lit the darkness. Discovered the world is rational and pi is not. Built the internal combustion engine and the computer models that prove it's going to kill us all.
The advancements made possible by the scientific method aren't so much due to a positive doctrine of ideas but rather because it created an alternative to dogma. Back in the day, the authority of the ancient Greeks had a stranglehold on progress. Aristotle believed men and women did not have the same number of teeth. Apparently, it never occurred to him to count them. Such a question will remain open as long as every time you apply for a grant to investigate, the response returns: That won't be necessary, Dr. Kitty. Aristotle already settled this.
Science has since thrown off dogma, or at least deference. Still, it kinda sucks there is no checklist, no royal road to discovery, as Archimedes answered King Whosis when He demanded instant knowledge of mathematics (I feel ya, King). How nice it would be. I am at point A and desire to go to point B, where point B is "longer lasting light bulb" and point A is "I don't have a longer lasting light bulb." Then, simply formulate a hypothesis, make a prediction, do an experiment, run an analysis and, viola!, longer lasting light bulb. (Okay, I admit: I peeked at Wikipedia.)
Science ain't like that. Known science isn't even like that, as anyone who has flipped to the back of the book exasperated for an answer can attest. Beyond the frontier, there is no back of the book. There is no book at all. I've been to the edge. And I stood and looked down. You know I lost a lot of friends there, baby. I got no time to mess around. David Lee Roth commenting on research, or so I presume. He certainly wasn't talking about love.
If there is a scientific method at all, it goes something like this: (1) poke experiment, (2) ask "can I publish that?" (3) if no, poke somewhere else. Repeat. That's as close as science gets to a method. Eventually there's a big pile of journal articles some wonk slaving in biotech stumbles across, and the next thing you know their company goes public and the CEO is doing lines of coke off the Laker girls. Meanwhile, the dean wants to give your lab space to the football team, the university Safety Officer is grumbling about your carbox tanks secured with rodent pelts, and the students are hatching Machiavellian schemes in your office hours to pinch points on the last exam. Congress treats you like you're some kind of shifty leprechaun taken to duping the taxpayers out of grant money to support your opulent lifestyle. The voters are easily swayed because too many of them think Iron Man is a documentary.
The difference between the popular notion of science and actual science is the difference between love idealized in a sonnet and the flesh and blood reality. Science is a wild stallion, beckoning the brave to come forth and ride. Usually you get thrown. Then Science comes to your house and stomps on all your stuff and destroys your marriage. Then it kills you from the long hours and bad food. The best thing you can hope for is to die in your sleep.
It's no accident the good stuff happens by accident.
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