The Processes of Scientific Discovery: The Strategy of Experimentation

Hans Krebs’ discovery, in 1932. of the urea cycle was o major event in biochemistry. This article describes a program, KEKADA, which models the heuristics Hans Krebs used in this discovery. KEKADA reacts to surprises, formulates explanotions, ond carries out experiments in the same manner as the evidence in the form of loboratory notebooks and Interviews indicates Hans Krebs did. Furthermore, we answer a number of questions about the nature of the heuristics used by Krebs, in particular: How domain-specific are the heuristics? To what extent are they idiosyncratic to Krebs? To what extent do they represent general strotegies of problem-solving search? The relative generality of KEKADA allows us to view the control structure of KEKADA and its domain-independent heuristics as a model of scientific experimentation thot should apply over a broad domain.