Behind the word serendipity lies the tale of a lost camel in a Persian fable. As the story goes, King Giaffar of Serendip once dispatched his three sons into the world to gain experience of life. Along their journey, the princes encountered a man who had lost his camel. Before he could utter a word, the three had already discerned the signs of the animal's passage: grass cropped along only one side of the path, uneven bite marks on the blades, and handprints beside hoofprints where the camel must have knelt. When the man asked whether they had seen it, they answered yes, though they hadn't. They told him it was blind in one eye, missing a tooth, and had carried a pregnant woman on its back. Astonished by their perception, the camel driver thanked them and followed their directions, eventually recovering the animal.
The three future rulers of Serendip, the ancient Persian name for today's Sri Lanka, had reconstructed the camel's likeness and route through sheer ingenuity and an acute attention to detail. The fable continues with the princes making one unexpected discovery after another, aided by chance meeting a mind that was prepared for it: a fitting illustration of Louis Pasteur's celebrated dictum that chance favours the prepared mind.
The story of the three princes of Serendip, composed by the Persian Sufi poet Amir Khosrow in 1300, inspired the British writer Horace Walpole to coin the word serendipity. It denotes the apparently fortuitous mechanism by which one stumbles upon a felicitous discovery while searching for something else entirely.
«Serendipity is the meeting point between chance and a mind prepared to welcome the unexpected. That mind knows there is something to discover along the way, even if it seldom knows what. But it knows it is there, and it is precisely in the space between knowing something exists and not knowing what it is that the greatest scientific discoveries are born», says Telmo Pievani, philosopher of biology and evolutionary theorist at the University of Milan and President of the Scientific Committee of BergamoScienza. We met him following the lecture that closed PhDay Molecular Medicine 2026, UniSR's event dedicated to presenting projects from the International PhD Programme in Molecular Medicine. UniSR's doctoral candidates regularly convene exchanges and events at which they host leading figures in science communication, as they did previously with Ilaria Capua.
Serendipity is productive ground for scientific research. Much as the three princes of Serendip, who had never laid eyes on the camel, discerned its presence through close attention to detail, the British physicist Peter Higgs recognised in 1964 that a new kind of subatomic particle, a boson, had to exist to account for the origin of mass. It took 48 years for that conjecture to be confirmed: in 2012, CERN in Geneva announced that it had identified what became known as the Higgs boson, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS and CMS experiments led by Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli. The interval between the initial hypothesis, that a new particle must account for mass, and the observed phenomenon of mass itself proved to be fertile ground for the discovery. The scientific community possessed both a prepared mind and the requisite technology to probe that uncharted space.
«Serendipity springs from an ambitious question, even one initially directed at a different goal from the one eventually attained, and this holds true for both basic and translational research», observes Pievani, who leads an interdisciplinary group studying human migration out of Africa. «In my view, 80% of research funding ought to go toward low-risk, low-gain work: research that proceeds from something known and accumulates gradually through incremental gains in knowledge. The remaining 20% should be directed toward high-risk, high-gain research, the kind aimed at ambitious questions that carry a substantial initial risk of failure».
Serendipity takes several forms. One occurs when research conducted within a given discipline yields consequences in an entirely different one. Brownian motion, the erratic movement of particles suspended in a liquid, is a case in point. The Scottish botanist Robert Brown first described it in 1827 while observing pollen grains under a microscope. It was the physicist Albert Einstein who, in 1905, demonstrated that Brownian motion is the most conspicuous manifestation of a microscopic phenomenon: the random collisions of fluid molecules against suspended particles, driven by thermal agitation.
On other occasions, serendipity leads to discoveries that resolve problems no one knew existed. «This is my favourite type of serendipity», Pievani remarks. Consider the invention of shatterproof safety glass by the French chemist Edouard Bénédictus, who one day let a glass flask slip from his hand. It cracked but did not shatter: the cellulose nitrate solution inside had evaporated, leaving a protective film on the inner wall that held the glass together despite the fractures. Years later, that chance observation found its way into the shatterproof windscreens used throughout the automotive industry.
In still other cases, serendipity arises when a purely exploratory question leads to discoveries of extraordinary technological consequence, as with CRISPR/Cas9. First studied as a bacterial defence mechanism against viruses, it was refined over the years into a sophisticated gene-editing tool through the work of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.
Serendipity may be unpredictable, but certain conditions can foster it. Foremost among them, as noted above, is a solid research question, even a purely exploratory one. In the 1960s, the young Japanese chemist Osamu Shimomura was working at Princeton University, where his supervisor, Professor Frank Johnson, had asked him to investigate the biological basis of bioluminescence, the phenomenon by which certain organisms emit their own light, in the jellyfish Aequorea.
Shimomura discovered that, in Aequorea, the protein aequorin emits blue light. Unexpectedly, he also came across another protein capable of absorbing that light and re-emitting it as green light, giving the jellyfish its characteristic bioluminescence.
That newly identified protein was named GFP, Green Fluorescent Protein, and it is now used in laboratories worldwide to visualise virtually any cellular process. It came as a complete surprise to Shimomura, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 with Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien: an unforeseen discovery, born of pure curiosity, from a question that had only set out to elucidate a basic biological phenomenon.
Shimomura was no stranger to protein biochemistry or bioluminescence. Before relocating to the United States, he had earned a degree in organic chemistry from Nagoya University, where Professor Yoshimasa Hirata had asked him to determine the structure of luciferin, an organic compound that enables the marine crustacean Cypridina hilgendorfii to glow blue. It took him ten months merely to extract and purify luciferin, an exceptionally unstable compound; once he finally succeeded, he was so elated that he could not sleep for three nights.
Long before turning to jellyfish, then, Shimomura had already devoted considerable time to marine organisms, proteins and bioluminescence. He eventually published his findings on luciferin, which caught Johnson's attention and led to the invitation to Princeton. There, building on work that others had already begun, he went on to discover aequorin and GFP. The rest is history.
Serendipity, then, is the product of several factors converging, not chance alone: experience, study, practice, and the capacity to draw on knowledge accumulated over centuries. It stems from what might be termed shrewd observation, the ability to notice details, and departures from those details, much as the princes of Serendip did in the fable. It can equally arise from what the geneticist Salvador Luria called “controlled sloppiness”, the skill, peculiar to those endowed with great experience and ingenuity, of knowing how to fail with style.
Serendipity can also be triggered by the emergence of powerful new technologies that make it possible to answer research questions once beyond reach.
Artificial intelligence is among these technologies, owing to its capacity to analyse vast volumes of data at speed and extract recurring patterns. «In Padua, my group and I use it to compare the genomes of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal in twenty minutes, work that previously required at least six months», Pievani says. Artificial intelligence affords the scientific community the time and the mental latitude to venture into precisely those ambitious questions that give rise to serendipity.
In 2018, the scientist Frances Arnold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for applying Darwin's theory of selection to enzymes in the laboratory. Arnold produced “synthetic” enzymes by introducing a series of mutations into naturally occurring ones. Mutation after mutation, trial after trial, she assembled an entire library of synthetic enzymes that subsequently found applications throughout the pharmaceutical industry, from vaccines to novel drugs. «Today Arnold can accomplish the same work far more rapidly, thanks to artificial intelligence, which can predict every possible mutation starting from a single protein, without the need to proceed manually in the laboratory», Pievani explains.
Artificial intelligence multiplies the possibilities for exploration, and with them, the likelihood of encountering something worth investigating that we do not yet know exists. In November 2023, DeepMind, the Google-owned creator of AlphaFold (the protein-structure-prediction software that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024), published a paper in Nature charting every possible combination of physically stable inorganic materials still unknown to science. Applying artificial intelligence, the team calculated roughly 2.2 million possibilities that could, in time, lead to materials we do not yet know we need, in order to solve problems we have not yet thought to pose.
It is within that ignorance that the seed of serendipity resides: the knowledge that there is something we do not know. «We do not know precisely how many species inhabit the Earth, nor how many exoplanets exist in distant galaxies. At times, we do not even know what we do not yet know, but it is always within that vast expanse of our own ignorance that infinite, wondrous possibilities for discovery reside». An ignorance that generates knowledge, which in turn generates innovation, and that is, in many respects, the mission UniSR has pursued all along: innovating through knowledge.
Telmo Pievani began his university studies in physics, before realising that laboratory life was not for him. He went on to a hybrid degree programme at the University of Milan that, at the time, combined physics with philosophy, mathematical logic, epistemology and the study of scientific method, before moving to New York to study evolutionary biology. «That degree no longer exists. Anyone who wishes to pursue philosophy of biology and evolution today must follow the standard Italian five-year path (a bachelor's degree followed by a master's) in biology, molecular biology, biological sciences or biotechnology. Thereafter, one may pursue further master's and doctoral programmes in philosophy applied to biology».
Highly specialised, narrow expertise is a comparatively recent development. The earliest modern scientists tended to range across several disciplines at once. Galileo was a physicist and astronomer, but also a writer of rare distinction: «He chose to communicate his discoveries by composing the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a theatrical work written in the vernacular so that it might be read by the greatest possible number of people, his patrons among them». Newton was a physicist, philosopher, alchemist and theologian; Darwin divided his attention between zoology, botany and palaeontology; and Edouard Bénédictus, the inventor of shatterproof windscreens, was a chemist by training but also one of the foremost figures of Art Deco, the artistic movement born in France during the 1920s and 1930s.
«Compared with the past, research today is organised around large multidisciplinary consortia, such as the one behind the discovery of the Higgs boson. Even individual research groups increasingly bring together people of different academic backgrounds: in mine, for instance, we have anthropologists, biologists, geneticists and palaeontologists, and I am the only philosopher. Serendipity also arises from interdisciplinary collaboration, in which differing perspectives converge to answer the same ambitious founding question», Pievani adds. This cross-pollination between disciplines is, in fact, a defining trait of UniSR, where the three faculties of Philosophy, Medicine and Psychology converge to answer a single question: quid est homo: what is man?
Pievani's group supports an international consortium dedicated to deciphering the language of cetaceans: whales, humpbacks and sperm whales. The Cetacean Translation Initiative aims to use artificial intelligence to reconstruct the recurring patterns that, together, constitute cetacean language, and to determine whether they correlate with particular behaviours, emotions or contexts. «This is where artificial intelligence proves invaluable: it excels at discerning patterns within linguistic codes. Should we succeed in reconstructing them, the next step will be to use them to send a message from us, as humans, to cetaceans, once again through AI», Pievani explains.
The project has already yielded some intriguing preliminary results. Among humpback whales, for instance, certain patterns appear to serve an identity-signalling function, indicating membership in a particular group associated with a given region of the Pacific. Other patterns appear to carry an emotional component linked to anxiety, a sign that the animal is conveying something tied to its own internal emotional state. «It is a hazardous project, with a considerable likelihood of failure. But should we succeed, it would mark the first time our species has communicated with another, not through sounds or gestures, but through a shared linguistic code», says Pievani, closing with a question of his own: «If you could put a single question to a whale, what would it be?»
Who knows, perhaps the three princes of Serendip glimpsed the whale too.
Museo Galileo, «Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo» (1632)
The Nobel Prize, «The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008» (GFP – Shimomura, Chalfie, Tsien)
The Nobel Prize, «The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018» (Frances Arnold)
The Nobel Prize, «The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020» (CRISPR/Cas9 – Doudna, Charpentier)
The Nobel Prize, «The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024» (AlphaFold – Hassabis, Jumper, Baker)
Merchant, A. et al., «Scaling deep learning for materials discovery», Nature, 2023 (GNoME)
Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) – https://www.projectceti.org/