We like to think that medicine is an exact science, as the adjective "haphazard" doesn't exactly inspire confidence when it's applied to people who have the power to stick their fingers up our ugly bits. But it turns out that some of the greatest discoveries in modern medicine didn't come about as a consequence of hundreds of dedicated doctors slaving away for hours in a lab. They occurred because people are often stupid, lazy, incompetent, unlucky or accident-prone.

And some of those people happen to be doctors.

In other words, while you have to be smart to make important scientific discoveries, making world-changing discoveries requires that you be just a bit crazy.