Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation

by Steven Johnson

Coral reefs make up about one-tenth of one percent of the earth’s surface, and yet roughly a quarter of the known species of marine life make their homes there.

Because incubators focus exclusively on the beginning of life, their benefit to public health—measured by the sheer number of extra years they provide—rivals any medical advance of the twentieth century. Radiation therapy or a double bypass might give you another decade or two, but an incubator gives you an entire lifetime.

“serendipity.” First coined in a letter written by the English novelist Horace Walpole in 1754, the word derives from a Persian fairy tale titled “The Three Princes of Serendip,”