Serendipity Confirms Young’s Law
“All great discoveries
are made by mistake”
The public needs to understand the unintentional aspects of science
The picture of “the scientist” in a white lab coat happily setting out to test a hypothesis is sometimes fulfilled, but not always. Young’s Law whimsically puts it, “All great discoveries are made by mistake.” Whoever Young was, he must have had a basis for stating this about academia. Sometimes nature whacks a scientist aside the head with the proverbial two-by-four. And sometimes Big Science continues on its consensus view despite a multitude of whacks.
Several recent articles and papers have illustrated the obstinacy of scientists, showing that they can ignore evidence that stares them in the face. This stubbornness can go on for decades sometimes until some serendipitous observation or brute fact turns the consensus upside down.
How often do unexpected scientific discoveries occur? More often than you might think (Nature, 21 Jan 2025). Big Science’s chief outlet, Nature, recognized serendipity’s role in science. In this article, Elizabeth Gibney discusses a study that “assessed 1.2 million biomedical publications and measured the ‘unexpectedness’ of their findings.”
Science is littered with serendipitous findings — such as Alexander Fleming’s chance observation that a mould killed the bacteria he was culturing, which led to the discovery of antibiotics. Now, a study has put a figure on just how often chance findings happen.
Around 70% of biomedical papers include outcomes that would not be expected from what the scientists proposed in their funding applications, according to the study in Research Policy1. Larger grants produced more chance findings.
This was the first time scientists tried to assess the role of ‘unexpectedness’ in scientific discovery.
“The bottom line is that ‘unexpectedness’ is not rare — this came through loud and clear,” says Ohid Yaqub, a biochemist and social scientist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Yaqub led the work as part of a wider project to understand the role in research of serendipity, of which unexpectedness is just one aspect.

Young’s Corollary: The greater the funding, the longer it takes to make the mistake.
Gibney did not ask this follow-up question: what is the public paying for? If discoveries are being made by chance, can we really trust scientists to find things on purpose? That leads us to the satirical corollary of Young’s Law: “The greater the funding, the longer it takes to make the mistake.”
Dark oxygen: New deep sea expedition to explore mysterious discovery (New Scientist, 23 Jan 2025). Here’s an example of ‘unexpectedness’ in science. The standard story has been that Earth’s oxygen was only made via photosynthesis. The early earth, therefore, was oxygen-free. Reporter Madeliene Cuff called it a “shock discovery” that “metallic nodules could be producing oxygen in the deep sea” – this “made headlines” last year and “confounded the research community” (the experts who are expected to know this stuff). See our 9 Sept 2024 article.
It’s too early to lean on this discovery amidst the controversy. Project lead Andrew Sweetman is setting out to confirm it with more detailed measurements next year to counter the critics in the scientific establishment who don’t believe it.
A further two expeditions will seek to investigate what microbial or electrochemical mechanisms may be at play, and start to explore the potential contribution of dark oxygen production in deep ocean ecosystems. It is the first research of its kind to directly explore these processes – Sweetman’s initial discovery was, by his own admission, “serendipitous”. “I didn’t set out to show this; we just set out to measure sea floor respiration,” he says of his initial work.
If oxygen has been produced naturally on the sea floor by rocks for all of Earth history, it could upset not only popular speculations about the origin of life, but also about the habitability of planets. Oxygen is very detrimental to the formation of biomolecules like proteins and nucleic acids. Living cells have to handle oxygen very carefully to avoid damage from reactive oxygen species (ROS).
‘Publish or perish’ culture blamed for reproducibility crisis (Nature, 20 Jan 2025). Here’s an illustration of Young’s Corollary. When pushed to perform, or funded without accountability, scientists can discover falsehoods. That’s what is meant by the “reproducibility crisis”— announcing “discoveries” that cannot be confirmed. Laurie Odesky writes that two-thirds of respondents to a survey agreed that the pressure to publish was responsible for irreproducibility.
The survey was conducted among biomedical researchers, but that’s not the only field where this crisis is running rampant. “The problem of irreproducibility in science has been documented in other fields and has been well known for decades,” said Kelly Cobey, a social psychologist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and lead author of the study. What does this remark do to your trust in Big Science?
The relevance of the history of biotechnology for healthcare (EMBO Reports, 2 Jan 2025). The authors of this essay argue for including courses in the history of biotechnology. Surely the stories about Pasteur and Mendel are worth retelling, but those were over a century ago. Listen to this quote near the end of the article about “critical challenges” facing biotechnology practices these days:
Over the years, concerns about biotechnology have been inflamed by suspicions that science is merely a tool for a technological imperative, that because something can be done, it should be done. As modern biology and its applications expanded, so did the demands to control how this knowledge will be used. Starting with the Human Genome Project, ethicists, scientists, and lawyers began to work together to assess not only what we can do, but also what we should do. Indeed, the application of specific innovations, such as cloning, whole-genome sequencing or gene editing raises significant ethical, legal, and societal issues about the safety and potential impact of genetically modified organisms and possible misuse. Concerns also exist about the long-term environmental consequences of modifying organisms’ genomes.
The authors ended on an optimistic note (damage control?) saying, “Although the field is often harnessed to ethical issues that at times hamper advancements, it is evident that biotechnology has brought humanity well-being and health, and its impact will only increase in the future.” Evident to whom?
Perhaps historically, we can look back and see a tremendous progress in health and well-being emerging from great scientists who were able to see through the thicket of human frailties. Whether progress toward well-being continues in our day of Big Pharma, political contributions, Big Business collusion with scientists, and academia’s dependence on hefty government funding remains to be seen.
What happened to “pure science”? Today’s practices are not ethically pure sometimes. Indeed, the furor over admissions that the Covid-19 pandemic started in a lab leak in Wuhan, China seems long overdue. Remember how “the scientific community” was outraged at “conspiracy theories” about that, and used their presumptive authority to demand censorship of such views on social media?
People need to realize that science is done by people— fallible humans who put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. It is not a mechanical “method” for discovering truth. It is always mediated by people with political biases, cultural values, and worldviews. It takes a strong dose of integrity to discern a truth about nature through the thicket of biases to which we are all subject. Big Science reduces public trust by continuing its practice of behaving like a subsidiary of liberal political parties.