Months ago, Crayola, the crayon giant announced the removal
of Dandelion from its palette of yellows and oranges. In March, the
company issued a news release saying that Dandelion’s replacement would be in
the blue family. Not long after, it added another tidbit of
information. The replacement would be a newly invented, never seen
before, hue of blue with a backstory as unique as its name, “YInMn Blue”.
In 2009, Mas Subramanian, an Oregon State University (OSU)
chemist, discovered the colour with his grad student, Andrew Smith. The
two were heating batches of manganese to 1200 °C (~2000 °F), hoping to produce a
high-efficiency electronic material. After one attempt, Smith pulled a
striking, brilliant-blue compound out of the furnace. Subramanian knew
right off it was a research breakthrough. Unwittingly, they had created a shade
of blue unlike any other from a combination of yttrium, indium, manganese, and
oxygen.
Recognizing opportunity, Subramanian and his team shifted
gears. They expanded their research. To date, they have created a range of
new pigments, everything from bright oranges to vibrant hues of purple,
turquoise, and green.
Discoveries of this sort are not uncommon in science.
X-rays, penicillin, and Kevlar are a few items that owe their existence to
usual circumstances where scientists were looking for one thing and happily
found something else. The nicotine patch is another.
In 1986, as Frank Etscorn, a behavioural psychologist,
walked across the floor of his basement laboratory in the New Mexico Institute
of Mining and Technology carrying an open vial, he stumbled. He had been studying sugar dependency in rats
and the vial contained a nausea-inducing substance found in tobacco that he
thought might reduce the rats’ cravings for sweets. When he stumbled, the brown liquid sloshed on
to his arm. “I wiped it off and didn’t pay attention,” he told a reporter for
People Magazine later. “But after about 15 minutes I felt nauseated.”
The experience sidetracked Etscorn, steering him into a new
area of research. “Almost immediately, I realized this could be a way for
people to stop smoking.”
It took years to produce a workable nicotine patch, but the
accident was the start of the process. Just as in Subramanian’s case, Etscorn
saw something others might have missed.
What does it take to recognize hidden opportunities when
they arise? Brain research provides some
clues. The corpus callosum, a thick band of more than 200 million nerve
fibres, connects the left and right hemisphere. Think of it as a busy
freeway where impulses fire back and forth, facilitating communication between
the two sides of the brain.
In brain studies, neuroscientists discovered that the corpus
callosum of creative individuals was thicker than normal. In such brains,
there appears to be more communication between the two hemispheres and greater
potential of connecting seeming disconnected ideas.
Not every brain hardwired with a thick callosum connects the
dots and capitalizes on unexpected circumstances, however. And it doesn’t
mean that a brain with a thin callosum cannot be a member of the discovery club
either. There’s more at play in taking advantage of serendipitous events than
simple brain mechanics.
Over a century ago, Louis Pasteur made a major discovery
after his lab assistants neglected a batch of petri dishes. Wondering how this
would affect his results, Pasteur opted to carry on the experiment. His decision
led to a breakthrough in the development of vaccines.
Luck played a role in the discovery. The lab
assistants messed up, providing Pasteur with opportunity. But Pasteur
recognized that more than luck was involved, too. Knowledge and
experience combined with curiosity seem to be another part of the
formula. Or, to quote Pasteur’s famous line, ‘Chance favours the prepared
mind’.
There you go, crayon lovers. Colour on with Crayola’s
new blue knowing that you are holding a bit of chance between your fingers.
