Serendipity is a remarkable phenomenon which happens when we come across a fortunate event purely based on chance. We will see that a significant number of scientific discoveries throughout history have been made by mistake; such that the intended result failed but the unintended consequence was so dramatic and beneficial that the researcher was awarded a Nobel prize.

A well-known example is that of the work of Alexander Fleming who had the foresight to realise that the mouldy formation in a dirty petri dish could be useful. At the time he was not studying antibiotics but he understood there was potential and penicillin has since saved millions of lives.

In this talk we will look at ten different Eureka moments in history and we can ask the question, do the people who made such discoveries deserve recognition and reward given that they stumbled upon the outcomes?