Pek van Andel was born near Amsterdam on 9-11-44: just before ‘Market Garden’, the desastrous Battle of Arnhem. He did his Gymnasium-bèta in Hengelo, and got his university degree in medical research in Groningen, where he developed, with the well known ophthalmologist Jan Worst, among other things, an artificial cornea for the ten million cornea blind in the world. The low-cost champagn-cork keratoprosthesis is still manifactured and implanted in Amritsar, Punjab, India. The simple device was honored with the Wubbo Ockels innovation prize by the city of Groningen in 1994. That year he published his 'Anatomy of the Unsought Finding. Serendipity : Origin, History, Domains, Traditions, Appearances, Patterns and Programmability’ in the prestigious British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (with 17 serendipity patterns).
In 2000 he won the satiric IgNobel Prize for medicine (for research that makes people laugh and then think) for iconoclastic MRI-scans of the human love act, published in the British Medical Journal (X-mas, 1999) and inspired in 1991 by the fMRI-scans of the larynx (made by Harm Schutte).
In 2005 he was registered in Groningen as the first ‘total donor’ in Holland. After death his organs and tissues are for transplantation and the rest is for the section room.
His Spielerei nebenbei pet sin to collect and analyze serendipities became Ernst im Spiel. He is regarded as ‘serendipitologist’ and is now finishing his thesis ‘Serendipity at Work’ as a medical maverick at the Medical Faculty in Groningen (m.v.van.andel@med.umcg.nl).