Original upload date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT
Archive date: Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:08:43 GMT
How to become a Serendipitologist? If we were to write a biography
on the Dutch Pek Van Andel that could be the title that covers his very versatile course of life.
Originally graduated in the fi
...
eld of medical research, Pek Van Andel investigated serendipity from all points of view, from the domains of science and technology to art. He shows his main insights in this TEDxLeuven talk.
Menko Victor (Pek) van Andel (Amsterdam, °1944) obtained his university degree in medical research in Groningen, where he developed an artificial cornea for the ten million cornea blind in the world.
This low- cost prosthesis is still manufactured and daily implanted in India, and was honored with the Wubbo Ockels innovation prize in 1994.
That very same year he published the first and only article on serendipity in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
In 2000 he won the satiric Ig-Nobel Prize for medicine for his iconoclastic MRI-scans of the human love act, called ‘Love between the magnets’.
His pet sin, collecting and analyzing serendipities became ‘Ernst im Spiel’. He is regarded as ‘serendipitologist’,, and, as a medical maverick, he is now finishing his thesis ‘Serendipity at Work’.
He’s still giving lectures, courses and master classes on serendipity in the US and Europe for university (PhD) students, investigators, and managers of respectable companies.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx
