Artificial Serendipity!

Serendipity is rapidly identifying unanticipated chemical transformation. In Princeton University, an effort to achieve “accelerated serendipity” uses robotics to perform more than 1,000 chemical reactions a day with molecules never before combined.

“Our process is designed specifically for serendipity to occur. The molecules that should be combined are those for which the result is unknown, In our lab, we used this technique to make new findings in a much more routine and rapid fashion, and we show that if you have enough events involved, serendipity won’t be rare. In fact, you can enable it to happen on almost a daily basis. This is a very different way of approaching how we come up with valuable chemical reactions,” MacMillan says.


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