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by F-Lexx 639 days ago
> Can you give a historic example of a human creating "truly novel ideas" that is not the product of mixing and matching existing ideas?

The invention of PCR comes to mind:

> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

1 comments

https://www.iflscience.com/lsd-dna-pcr-the-strange-origins-o... would argue that it was exactly mixing and matching at play here, but that the component parts wouldn't necessarily have been called to mind without the hallucination.