Food for Thought Serendipity and me

Abstract

How much of your scientific career has unfolded as you planned, and how much has been shaped by blind luck? I suspect the latter has been more important than many of us realize, or at least acknowledge, but as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind”—implying that we have at least some control over how random events affect our lives. Here, I discuss how large and small chance events have affected the trajectory of my scientific career.