International MSc and PhD Programs in Complexity Sciences

‘One can’t look for the unknown, because then you don’t know where to look for.’ (Sofists, Meno, Plato, 386?-2? BC.)

The lecture begins with a story teller’s version of The Three Princes of Serendip (1302) of Amir  Khusrau, the greatest poet in the Persian language. The British letter writer Horace Walpole  derived and coined the word serendipity in 1754 from the fairy tale: ‘as their highnesses  travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents & sagacity, of things they were not  in quest of [..] you must observe that no discovery of what you are looking for comes under this  description.’ The word serendipity was printed for the first time in 1833 and then only used by  bibliomanes. In 1945 the term was imported in science by an experimental physiologist, Walter  Cannon, at Harvard Medical School. A sociologist of science, Robert Merton, introduced the  word in the social sciences, in the 1940s. Serendipity is a surprising observation followed by a  correct abduction (= hypothesis). The triggering surprise is an unanticipated, abnormal and  crucial datum: an enigma (no theory at all), an anomaly (against accepted theories) or a novelty  (not in conflict with accepted theories). The new can’t be extrapolated logically from the old. If  that would be possible it would not be new. For the new an unpredictable element is needed,  such as a surprising observation (as a trigger of the serendipity). Serendipity is by definition beyond intuition, imagination, and fantasy. There are grosso modo three ways to find the new: non-serendipity (find the sought), pseudo-serendipity (find the sought by a crucial accident) and serendipity (find the unsought). Original research walks on two legs, one for hypothesis testing, the other for anomaly explaining (= serendipity). Claude Bernard wrote on ‘accidental’ observations: ‘Nothing is accidental, and what seems to us accidental in only an unknown fact  whose explanation may furnish the occasion for a more or less important discovery.’ The  behaviourist Burrhus Skinner therefore advised: ‘When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.’ For example, as Friday afternoon or night experiment. Because  directed research and serendipity don’t exclude, but complement and even reinforce each  other. As the French physicist Louis Leprince-Ringuet noted: “The true researcher must know to give attention to signs that will unveil the existence of a phenomenon that he does not expect.”

Menko Victor (Pek) van Andel was born near Amsterdam on 9-11-1944. He did his Gymnasium-bèta in Hengelo, and got his university degree in medical research in Groningen, where he developed, with the internationally known and inventive ophthalmologist Jan Worst, among other things, an artificial cornea for the ten million cornea blind in the world. The low-cost champagne-cork keratoprosthesis is still manufactured and implanted in Amritsar, Punjab, India. More than three thousand up till now. The simple device was honored with the Wubbo Ockels innovation prize by the city of Groningen in 1994. That year he published his ‘Anatomy of the Unsought Finding. Serendipity: Origin, History, Domains, Traditions, Appearances, Patterns and Programmability’ (with 17 serendipity patterns) in the prestigious British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (45:2 (1994: June) 631-648, online at bjps.oxfordjournals.org) 

In 2000 he won the satiric Ig-Nobel Prize for medicine - for ‘improbable research’: research that makes people laugh and then think - for the iconoclastic and classic MRI-scans of the human love act, published in the British Medical Journal (1999, 319, 1596-1600) and inspired in 1991 by fMRI-scans of a singing human larynx (online at bmj.com). Science called the study ‘Love between the magnets’. 

In 2005 Pek van Andel was registered in Groningen as the first ‘total donor’ in Holland, and Europe. After death his organs and tissues are for transplantation and the rest is for the section room. 

His Spielerei nebenbei, his pet sin, to collect and analyze serendipities became Ernst im Spiel. He is regarded as ‘serendipitologist’, as he was first called by critics. He published with Danièle Bourcier De la sérendipité dans la science, la technique, l’art et le droit: Leçons de l’inattendu, Chambéry, L’act mem, 2009, 304 p. (online at Calaméo) and directed with her also La Sérendipité: le hasard heureux, Paris, Hermann, 2011, 416 p. He is now finishing his thesis Serendipity at Work as a medical maverick at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen.  

He still gives often lectures, courses and masterclasses on the subject in the US and Europe for university (PhD) students, and investigators and managers of firms like AKZONobel, Philips, Unilever, Nestlé, etc. And he still lectures on Ig Nobel Prize winners’ tours during Science Weeks in the UK, Denmark, and Sweden. 

He has got his name 'Menko Victor' from a hero, Menko H.H. König, a student who blew up six Dutch railway bridges leading to the East. He was betrayed, by the greatest betrayer (Anton van der Waals, payed by the Nazis) and executed in 1943. Van der Waals was also executed in 1950. Menko König was a house friend of his family, the memory of that young god was too painful, so Menko>Menk>Mek>Pek... 

His e-mail adress is <m.v.van.andel@med.umcg.nl>. 

Bibliography of his books about serendipity: