The Emporia Gazette

May 28, 2012

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I have told this story many times. Usually it has been verbal. I do not think I have ever told it in one of these columns. If I have, it was so long ago that I can do it again. I will, if I have my way. It is about some of my own experiences with chance.

What is serendipity? I am not sure that my experiences were really serendipity, but they certainly were chance and luck. In any event, serendipity is “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” That is what my dictionary says.

The work comes from Horace Walpol’s story entitled “The Three Prices of Serendip.” It is a fairy tale in which the heroes, the princes, were always making fortunate discoveries. Serendip, as I recall, was the name of the big island east of India. It became Ceylon and is now Sri Lanka.

With that background, let us now get to my experiences. For my master’s degree research at Michigan State University, I was studying slime molds (Myxomycetes) on the bark of living trees. I was interested in what species of trees they were on, how high and low they were, what side they were on, etc.

I collected pieces of bark, took them to the lab and placed them in Petri dishes. In a few days, slimy masses of non-cellular protoplasm appeared, then tiny fruiting structures appeared and I could identify the slime mold. Things went well.

A bit later, however, some of the slimy masses did not produce fruiting structures. I put some under the microscope and found them full of long cells. These could not be slime molds. I searched the literature and decided they were slime bacteria (myxobacteria). There were about 35 professors over in the Bacteriology Department. I asked them all about what I had found. None had ever seen one, knew anything about them, nor knew anyone who did.

I told my advisor, a specialist in fungi, about it all. He laughingly said I should do my doctoral thesis on the slime bacteria. Then, I could be the world authority on the group, he said and laughed again. I did and I was. But nobody really cared.

There, then, was my first chance experience. I gave many presentations on my slime bacteria research at national meetings. Others found it interesting, but nobody really cared about my slime bacteria.

At a national meeting at the University of Illinois in the middle 1960s, I had given an afternoon presentation. Afterwards, a young man asked to take me to dinner. I accepted. He was the microbiologist at a Chicago chemical company. Some of the chemicals they made were vermicides, chemicals which killed worms.

He told me that a Canadian group had published a paper about a new bacterium they had found which killed worms. It was a SORANGIUM, they said. I had just talked about SORANGIUM that afternoon. Would I come to Chicago and talk to his company people about it?

I did. My travel expenses were paid and I was given $200 — big money then. And I was driven from the airport in a big, black, chauffeur-driven limousine. My first such experience.

A week later, I had a call from Sam Ringel, the head microbiologist at the Warner-Lambert Company in New Jersey. He and I had been in graduate school together. He wanted to know if I would come and talk with them about SORANGIUM.

Sam told me that Warner-Lambert had decided to begin making antibiotics. At their recent meeting about that, one of them had mentioned a paper by a Canadian group of researchers. The Canadians had found a bacterium in the soil which produced an antibiotic. They identified the bacterium as SORANGIUM.

When the Warner-Lambert group asked what SORANGIUM was, it struck Sam that it was one of my myxobacteria. He told them and they all said he should get me there to tell them about it. I went, got expenses and $200 and was again picked up in a big, black, chauffeur-driven limousine.

My visit with Warner-Lambert ended with them giving me a big grant to support my research. I traveled all over collecting SORANGIUM from soil, testing it for antibiotic possibilities and sending those which seemed active to Warner-Lambert. That went on for five years. It included a half-year stay in Sweden and a trip to South Africa via Paris, Rome and Kenya.

When I went to the “Canadian Journal of Microbiology” and read the two papers about SORANGIUM, I immediately knew that the organism was definitely not SORANGIUM. They had made a big mistake in identifying it. But, wow! Their mistake was awfully good for me!

Warner-Lambert did find some antibiotic activity in some of my SORANGIUM. That led to a published paper and that led to other companies coming after me.

So! You see how beneficial serendipity, chance and luck and be. It certainly has been great for me. I would keep it happening for all of us, if I had my way.