Serendipity in Psychiatry

Searching google for the meaning of 'serendipity' you’ll find, along with the Wikipedia entries, a link to a cool Danish fashion label, called serendipity ORGANICS. They sell wonderful and comfortable organic children's wear in Scandinavian style... and further: a romantic comedy titled ‚serendipity' in 2001, starring John Cusack, about finding, losing and finding again. The story begins in a New York restaurant named ‚Serendipity III’, which was founded in 1954. There even is a blog software called serendipity '- in the 21st century serendipity seems to be a common cultural code!

When I read the word for the first time in the mid-80s in a Parisian apartment in the 18th arrondissement, Google didn’t exist yet (because it was invented only10 years later), and I tried then laboriously to explore and study the meaning of this mysterious word in numerous encyclopedias. The word serendipity seemd then to me to be something magical, even more: a kind of higher wisdom or artistic attitude, since I deduced it - in my own ignorance - from the words serenity (in latin serenitas, which means serenity and grace) and pity (from latin pietas, that is to say mildness, gentleness or mercy and compassion) and therefore attributed a quasi-esoteric epistemological formula to it, and even more: a highly transcendental or metaphysical level of consciousness. And that was pretty close to superstition, magic and synchronicity.

The term itself, however, has been repeatedly and ‚serendipitously’ rediscovered: for the first time by the original discoverer and already then meant to combine empirical science and the grace of chance. The scholar, writer and letter writer Horace Walpole, son of the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and 4. Earl of Orford, himself a politician, artist and founder of the English landscape garden wrote to his friend, the Ambassador Horace Mann, in 1754:

"This discovery indeed is almost of that kind which i call serendipity, a very expressive word, Which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as Their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of ... "

The story Walpole referred to was actually published in 1557 in Venice, in which the sons of the king of Serendip, a region in today’s Sri Lanka, went throug numerous adventures on their journey to the neighboring lands. It seems to me no coincidence that this word was created in the century of enlightenment, the siècle des lumières, and had emerged in the twilight of the gods of science so to say. After that Walpolian word invention, it disappeared for 120 years and was almost forgotten. until the bibliophile chemist Edward Solly wrote a review of Walpole in 1875, namely that "Horace Walpole used the word serendipity to express a particular kind of natural cleverness. Cleverness and sagacity in finding, discovery and invention then, without which serendipity is not possible. Robert K. Merton, a sociologist (who obviously had a soft spot for the magical-religious and inter alia coined the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy), then went into that term again  in the 1930's and 40's and with his book, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, he established the now worldwide dissemination of the word serendipity. However, the frequent use as a socio-cultural truism is recorded only since the late 1980's and 90's: searching Google for serendipity today, that is in 2013, I obtain about 13'800'000 results!

The discovery of many precursors of psychotropic drugs in use today that were developed in the period between 1940 and1960, are told to have been serendipitous. Examples include not only the benzodiazepines, chlorpromazine, imipramine and lithium, but also lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), synthesized in 1938 by the Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann (see also his well known book: LSD - My Problem Child). Serendipity in the development of new drugs therefore implies the discovery of one drug, while actually looking for another one. Therefore, serendipity indeed seems to be one of the factors leading to the discovery of new drugs. And just this assumption is disputed by many scientists. Probably this misunderstanding (and the related dispute) could be easily solved if one could agree in the meaning of the term, its significance and its implications.

Let's take it non-ideological: if it would go to either-or between pure, quasi-magical chance discovery as a research principle and scientific research, then - the conclusion - you could just as well do without empirical and scientific research. Well, in fact you cannot. In all discoveries in psychopharmacology, which are attributed to serendipity, always a clever, laborious research was involved aside from the grace of chance. Today's science defends itself - probably rightly -  to accept serendipity as a condition of programmatic research. And in fact ‚finding’ (versus ,designing') can only be a goal or a purpose, but not method or program! The art in research probably ist not to be blind for serendipitous findings (which might be termed ‚bahramdipity’, when it comes to suppressing ‚serendipity’). In fact, there is a paradox: what should become of the original search for a treasure of knowledge and wisdom, if something else - perhaps much more beautiful and precious - has been found?