A VA endocrinologist orders lizard venom from a catalog. A Hungarian biochemist sews cash into a teddy bear to flee a country that cut her funding. A graduate student in Spain spends a decade getting papers rejected about bacterial DNA repeats nobody cares about. A team at Google tries to make a translation product faster.
These acts of randomness have given us weight-loss drugs, mRNA vaccines, CRISPR gene editing, and generative AI.
Below, we track a dataset of discoveries where money went one place and the breakthrough arrived in a different place entirely. We attribute the chain of major discoveries, through the people, decades, funding sources, institutions, and randomness that brought them into the world.
The chains show that breakthroughs depend on funded curiosity, preserved findings, chance encounters, lab accidents, failed experiments, side effects, and luck — usually several at once.
11 discoveries traced to their origins
Each of these discoveries followed the same pattern — investment in X, breakthrough in Y. The chains are shorter here, but the structural randomness is the same.
Can we brute force random scientific discovery?
Can we “predict” random scientific discovery?
We are not sure. This website will be updated to highlight the people trying. In the meantime, we’ve collected a list of curiosities that may be worth learning more about.