Chase, Chance, and Creativity

by James H Austin

  We observed earlier that serendipity included good luck coming as the result of an accident, general exploratory activity, or sagacity. Somehow, the list is incomplete. Something, we sense, is missing. What is lacking?

  The motor counterpart to sagacity. Chance favors the individualized action. This is the fourth element in good luck-an active, but unintentional, subtle individualized prompting of it. Note: this is not selfpromotional behavior. Only metaphorically might it be said that some element of "courting" is involved, to the degree that chance is still referred to as "Lady Luck" or "Dame Fortune" in many cultures.; But any impression of flirtation would be false, because the participants' paths intersect by accident, and none of the consequences can be foreseen.

  Let us pursue this proposition for a moment because it helps us visualize the fourth element of good luck in a little different perspective. We recall that in the true affaire du coeur the lady sought will not bestow her favors indiscriminately. The suitor may be a mover and a shaker who diffusely smothers her with attentions, or he could be a prince from a foreign land in all his finery. But the queen of India yields to the blandishments of neither (appendix A). She responds instead to another suitor with whose particular personal qualities she herself finds a special deeper affinity. These qualities may appear trivial to onlooker, but they take on a special deeper meaning to the two persons involved, who may themselves be quite unaware of their significance. He who pays court will express these qualities unconsciously, by word, gesture, and deed-each a highly individualized motor activity revealing his own temperament and special motivations; each the product of the unique experiences of his lifetime. However, the word, "unconscious" must be interpreted with great care. One must avoid the tendency to attach any of its usual psychoanalytical premises to the operations of Chance IV. Only fortuitously, and not motivated by some unconscious radar, do these behavior traits happen to intersect the invisible trajectory of the intractable problem. No mystical foreknowledge enables such traits to "search purposefully" for that particular match which can yield just one, self-satisfying solution.

  Chance IV is the kind of luck that develops during a probing action which has a distinctive personal flavor. The English Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, summed up the principle underlying Chance IV when he noted that, as persons, "we make our fortunes and we call them fate." Disraeli, the practical politician, appreciated that by our actions we each forge our own destiny, at least to some degree. Chance IV comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave. Disraeli was aware that our so-called "quirks of fate" are often oneman-made. They are a highly individual matter, as personal as your signature or your fingerprints. Because Chance IV is so personal, it is not easily understood by someone else the first time around. The outside observer may have to go underground to see Chance IV, for here we probe into the subterranean recesses of personal hobbies and behavioral quirks that autobiographers know about, biographers rarely. Neurologists may be a little more comfortable with the concept, because so much of the nervous system we work with exists as anatomically separate sensory and motor divisions. So, some natural separation does exist in our brains and underlies the distinction: Chance III, concerned with personal sensory receptivity; its counterpart, Chance IV, involved with personal motor behavior.

  There is no mystery about Chance IV, nothing supernatural about the way it generates an uncommon discovery. But you do have to look carefully to find Chance IV for three reasons. The first is that when it operates directly, it unfolds in an elliptical, unorthodox manner. The second is that it often works indirectly. The third is that some problems it may help solve are uncommonly difficult to understand because they have gone through a process of selection. We must bear in mind that, by the time Chance IV finally occurs, the easy, more accessible problems will already have been solved earlier by conventional actions, conventional logic, or by the operations of the other forms of chance. What remains late in the game, then, is a tough core of complex, resistant problems. Such problems yield to none but an unusual approach, much as does the odd lock in an old door open only to the rare key. Under normal circumstances we won't be able to state what shape such a key should take, because we are not familiar with the contours of the tumblers it must fit inside the odd lock. What makes Chance IV even more unpredictable is that the kind of personal behavior it requires-itself the key to the solution-lies hidden out of sight, unidentified, until a particular set of circumstances calls it into play.

  The situation bears some analogies to the way a mutation acts. For example, we have learned since Gregor Mendel's day how it happens that a rare but helpful mutation enables a bean plant to survive unusually difficult extremes of temperature. But, until we have exposed the plant to such extremes, the potential effect of its mutation lies hidden, dormant. The special kind of activity within Chance IV is adaptive in a similar way, and also has survival value. It also waits, invisible, until summoned by unique external circumstances, a setting that corresponds with it precisely.

  Unlike Chance II, Chance IV connotes no generalized activity of the kind that busy worker bees might have in the anonymity of a hive. Instead, it comprehends a kind of discrete behavioral performance focused in a highly specific manner. Whereas the lucky connections in Chance 11 might come to anyone with disposable energy as the happy by-product of any aimless, circular stirring of the pot, the links of Chance IV can be drawn together and fused only by one quixotic rider cantering in on his own homemade hobby horse to intercept the problem at an odd angle. As we shall see in a subsequent chapter, Chance IV resists straight logic. At first glance, you might think that it takes on something of the eccentric flavor of Cervantes' Spanish fiction. However, those who experience it know that it is grounded in fact. Autobiographers are more likely to know which of their unusual personal (and often private) qualities made their "strokes of luck" more incredible than any accounts in fiction.

  What psychological factors enter, often at very odd angles, into the varieties of chance? Chance I is completely impersonal. You can't influence it. Personality traits only start to enter in the other forms of chance. Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore. Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations. Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal life styles, and motor behaviors. The farther apart these personal activities are from the area under investigation, the more novel and unexpected the product of the encounter.

  Table 1 summarizes the elements involved in the varieties of chance. They can help us probe for the more complex, actual reasons underlying the bland statements made by most successful persons that they were simply "in the right place at the right time. With some of these distinctions in mind, let us now go back and review the origins of chance in part I of this tale.

  16

  Personal Encounters with Chance I-IV

  The way of fortune is like the milky way in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

  Francis Bacon

  The younger the scientific field, the more it responds to the human, subjective elements of chance; the older, well-defined field has less room for open-field running, requires a more disciplined, objective conscious effort. I know I have chosen to work in areas of medical biology that are regarded as "softer" sciences from the perspective, say, of an advanced nuclear physicist or mathematician. Yet the principles underlying the lucky art of novelty seem likely to remain the same, and if there are differences, they would appear to be more of frequency and degree than of kind. In any event, Chance has usually been a welcome guest in our research. It was pure luck of the type appreciated by Claude Bernard that I happened to encount
er the patients with hypertrophic neuritis and MLD in the hospital at the right time. Later, when Frank Witmer intervened, his infrared expertise in the sulfatide story was both timely and decisive, yet it came about with no initial effort on my part, but rather through the agency of Roy Swank and his patient, Frank's wife.

  The origins of Chance II are seen in my restless probing during the flawed hyaluronic acid sulfate experiments (chapter 6). These studies stemmed from curiosity, from muddled ruminations about metachromasia which could best be externalized by a broadly focused experiment. The by-products of the experiment were all fortuitous and quite unpredicted.

  As for the discernment of Chance III, I could grasp the importance of the experimental globoidlike response to cerebroside when I saw it in the rat because I had earlier observed that the same microscopic appearance was the distinctive feature of human globoid leukodystrophy.

  The sequences involved in Chance IV are more personal and are difficult to perceive and unravel unless one has known for a lifetime the person involved. When Bimal Bachhawat's group teamed up with our group, we could go on to discover that sulfatase A was deficient in MLD. But that connection hinged on events that brought me all the way to India to meet Bimal. We can trace the steps in this back to the cold war setting, and to friendships in Oregon with the Danas and the Finegolds. These were the circumstances that started my meddling in politics. Thereafter, in a curious kind of inevitability, they shaped my decision to become actively involved in India (see figure 7). Such are the turning points that decide major issues. Hidden from view, they are subtle but telling. And usually untold.

  In the Lafora body episode, the outcome depended on recognizing the similarities between a starch granule and a Lafora body. Yet, again, the story doesn't begin there. For we must go back to ask: what steps led up to the presence of the starch granule, and why in a hunting dog? If this line of questioning points to the man who followed his dog afield, it is only a temporary answer. For footprints in the snow ultimately lead us back to the kind of boy who tried to narrow the gap between the rabbit and himself; beyond that, I dimly sense an atavistic kinship with a cave dwelling ancestor on the game trail in the distant prehistoric past. All this is not to imply that Chance IV is predestined or violates physical laws, but rather to suggest that if it seems to take on a quality of being instigated, it is by remote events too subtle and far removed to he under any variety of willful intent, let alone control.

  Chance also occurs in mixtures, and the more improbably diverse are these ingredients, the more novel are the results when they combine. Thus, elements of Chance I through IV occurred in my work as a result of my lifelong attraction to colors in general, and my curiosity about metachromatic colors in particular. These prompted my diffuse reading in the literature, and led me to appreciate that a disease existed-MLD- in which color was the salient feature. The special interests in colors in childhood and with the microscope in summer camp preceeded by years the crucial experiment designed to stain urine sediment in the MLD patient. Because I didn't really know then exactly what I was looking for, it was my long-standing concern for color and form which made it possible to single out the golden-brown granular body of MLD.

  When I glance at the date on my first watercolor painting of the New York skyline as viewed down the Hudson River, I see the year 1955. Only in retrospect do I grasp that it was painted during the "red and blue period" at Columbia.' I was then staining the urine with toluidine blue and was swept up in the question: what did all these metachromatic colors mean? Now, in retrospect, I can perceive how the scientific problem stimulated my artistic interest, in the same way that my earlier childhood curiosity about the "cause" of colors itself led on to the scientific search. Colors ... to research ... to water color painting; the connections to and fro were not at all clear to me at the time.

  Back in 1974, I again made a deliberate choice to take a sabbatical year abroad to be stimulated by a different culture. And the decision to chase novelty in the laboratory was also a conscious one. The underlying motive was to repair my ignorance about neuropharmacology. In this fertile field, more work was still needed to clarify how norepinephrine acted in the brain. To live in the culture of Japan, and to do bench research at Kyoto University, turned out to be pivotal career decisions. It happened that long sequences of "happy accidents" did unfold.' Among such unpredictables was the special opportunity to learn how to meditate with my eyes open at a Zen Buddist temple. After two months of practice, I regularly entered into stages of meditation when associative thoughts had largely melted away, and relaxation was complete. Twenty minutes after starting meditation in a dimly lighted room, after a prelude of yellow-green color, I consistently went through a phase in which a luminous orb of vivid, complementary red-purple colors glowed in the darkened central portion of my vision. The phenomenon waxed and waned without my conscious control, and was accompanied by a pleasant feeling of relaxation. Here was a spontaneous emphasis on red-purple springing from the depths of my own brain!'

  But personal experiences aside, we need a new general term something like serendipity to convey the elusive quality of the workings of Chance IV. Moreover, it would help to have an illustrative story something like the Three Princes of Serendip (but not as difficult to locate). At this moment, we have neither the word nor the tale.

  We don't have to turn to ancient Persian history for the exotic, or go as far as Sri Lanka for a name. A true story already exists, and in its twists and turns it illustrates a happy reunion between art and science. A curious feature of the tale is that it not only involves a dog, but either parallels or reflects an inverted mirror image of some other personal events in the narrative in part I. The scene opens in Spain only a hundred years ago, but its distant origins sweep us back four hundred or more generations, back to the time of our Cro-Magnon ancestors.

  17

  The Spanish Connection

  Papa, Papa! Look! Painted bulls!

  Maria de Sautuola

  When you visit the hill, there is nothing externally distinctive about it, nor is it really as high as its name might suggest. Still, it does afford a good view of the rolling farming countryside that extends around it, of orange-roofed houses basking in the warm Spanish sunshine. Perhaps that is why, for as many years back as local records go, the hill has always been called Altamira.

  Altamira lies inland between the northern seacoast of Spain and the base of the Cantabrian Mountains. The land immediately around it was but a minute portion of the extensive estates of a cultured Spanish nobleman, and there seemed no good reason why he should ever pay closer attention to this particular parcel. For its owner, Don Marcelino, Marquis de Sautuola, was more familiar with his own locale some twenty miles away on the Bay of Biscay. He had grown up there around his ancestral home in the old Castillian seaport city of Santander. As he grew up, Don Marcelino developed many hobbies to occupy his time. He became a bibliophile, a horticulturalist, a genealogist of the noble families of his province, and as chance would have it, a student of its geological and archaeological features.

  One day in 1868, a hunter was afield chasing foxes near Altamira. Suddenly, to his astonishment, his spaniel vanished into thin air. The puzzled hunter whistled and searched but to no avail. Finally, he stumbled upon a crevice in the ground near a rocky outcropping. Putting his ear to the hole, he could hear the dog whimpering and barking underground. Pulling rocks aside, the hunter widened the aperture, eased himself down into the cold dark hole, and hauled his grateful spaniel out. His own native curiosity then impelled him to look around, and in the dim light he perceived something surprising. He had discovered a cave.

  It took seven more years before the cave of Altamira was reexplored. It happened only because a friend, knowing of Don Marcelino's geological interests, told him he had a cave on his property. Some days later, Don Marcelino first visited the cave with some workmen, widened the opening, and crept down the slope by its entrance until the cavern became high enough for hi
m to stand. In the flickering torch light, he soon discovered many large bones, frequently split lengthwise. He later showed these bones to his friend, Spain's greatest prehistorian of the time, Don Juan Vilanova, professor of geology at Madrid University. Professor Vilanova pointed out that the bones came from a bison, a wild horse, and an extinct giant stag. He observed that a human being must have split the bones to remove and eat the marrow.

  Thoughts of the cave incubated in Don Marcelino's mind for another four years before he returned to it. In the interim, he meandered elsewhere, made field trips to other caves in Spain, and found out how to excavate them. Then, ten years after the hunting spaniel disappeared from view, de Sautuola, while on a trip to Paris, paid a rewarding visit to the International Exhibition of 1878. He was enormously influenced by displays of prehistoric arrowheads and other flint tools found recently by explorers in cave sites in France. These stone artifacts had been discovered among the same kind of split bones that he had found earlier at Altamira. He was so stimulated by his trip that he determined to reexplore his own cave for similar stone tools. So he went back again the following year, when he was forty-eight years old; and found a number of stone artifacts, their edges so worked that he was certain prehistoric man had inhabited his cave.

  Don Marcelino continued to excavate for several days, and then, as one does, grew tired of digging alone in the damp earth underground. At this point, the indulgent father could readily agree when his nineyear-old daughter Maria asked if she, too, could come along to look at the cave. So it happened that while he dug in the dirt near the entrance, his daughter played and crawled about farther down in the cavern.

  Suddenly she cried out in astonishment: "Papa, Papa! Mira! Toros pintados!" He hurried over to a nearby chamber, and followed her openmouthed gaze upward to the ceiling. Up there, in the flickering lamplight, his own startled eyes saw the colored paintings of a herd of snorting, charging, great bison! As he peered more closely at the ceiling, he could see how the artist had cleverly used the existing bulges on the cave roof to give a three dimensional bas-relief quality to the natural contours of each animal. His aesthetic sensibilities could only marvel at the keen powers of observation of the artist who, with the bold sure touch of a master, had not only captured the natural grace of each bull, cow, and calf, but had gone on to render it with a unique style of his own.