Serendipity ((install)) | EXCLUSIVE |

In the 21st century, serendipity is under siege. We live in an age of hyper-curation. We use GPS so we never get lost; we rely on recommendation engines that tell us exactly what movies we will like based on what we have already watched; we filter our social media feeds to remove dissenting opinions.

It was a rainy Tuesday in Boston when Dr. James H. Austin, a neurologist, missed his bus. Frustrated, he ducked into a quiet library to wait out the downpour. Bored and cold, he picked up a dusty medical journal he would never normally read. Inside, a single sentence about a rare side effect of a common drug caught his eye. That sentence would later spark a breakthrough in how we understand dopamine and lead to a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Serendipity