Polysaccharides for Drug Delivery and Pharmaceutical Applications Book

I found this book through Naval's How to Get Rich podcastr episodes, where he referenced Marc Andreesen's blog post on luck:

While Part I and Part II were good reads, I found completing the book arduous after the four types of luck (called chance in the book) were described and expounded upon in Part II. In particularlyt he Author's unrelenting use of Male gender pronouns for Doctors, Scientists, and any Researchers grated on me throughout the book. For that reason and some of the clearly outdated descriptions such as "Feminine" traits'my raiting shouldn't be viewed as a recommedation, but instead as what I was able to take away from the reading in spite of itself.

Readers will have differing perspective of Austin's, decision to take a autobiographic account of his own research and science contributions. I found it quite useful in that he went beyond the superficial moments of serndipity (the origins of this word were a fun detour) and actually highlighted the years of meandering research and false starts that went into his greatest contributions.

It's a useful data point that based on my own experience more closely resembles true discovery than the Newtonian Apple falling from the tree.

A premise that isn't really touched on in detail here is the importance of documenting your ideas. A scientist would never enter the lab without the proverbial lab notebook, and yet in software development disciplines we too often only "orally" dialogue about our hypothesis.

As Austin writes:

"Oral reports are perishable; they have no permanent scientific value."

' Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty (The MIT Press) by James H. Austin