3 TEARS, MOLDS, MELONS, AND LOTS OF COLLODION: THE SCIENCE OF THE UNEXPECTED

Ohid Yaqub is a young biochemist who has turned his attention to the sociology of science. He works on research policy, science funding systems, and innovation in the biomedical field at the University of Sussex in Brighton. A few years ago, the European Research Council awarded him a grant of no less than €1.4 million to study the most elusive of subjects: how to foresee the unforeseeable and find logic in the illogical. Even the journal Nature, in an editorial in February 2018, commented on the strange nature of the ambitious task. Yaqub must, in fact, unlock the secrets of serendipity, the phenomenon coined by Walpole whereby scientists are looking for something but find something else. Will he succeed?