The breakthroughs, of course, were exceptions. One Saturday morning experiment accidentally dissolved an important piece of equipment. In another, Smithies contaminated his shoes with a putrid chemical. He thought he had aired them out sufficiently, until he heard one elderly woman ask another if she smelled a dead body. Smithies could not resist “picking up anything” to experiment with, he said, a habit his colleagues noticed. Rather than throw out damaged equipment, they would leave it for him, with the label NBGBOKFO: “no bloody good, but OK for Oliver.”
An enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a recurring theme in research on creative thinkers. University of Manchester physicist Andre Geim employs (with no relation to Smithies) “Friday night experiments” (FNEs). It was a Friday night when he began the work that led to his 2000 Ig Nobel Prize. The Ig Nobel is given for work that at first blush seems ridiculous or trivial. The mascot is an image of Rodin’s The Thinker sculpture, except “The Stinker” has fallen off his pedestal and is lying on his back on the ground. Recipients are asked beforehand if they are willing to accept the award, so they can weigh reputational concerns. Geim won for levitating a frog with strong magnets. (Frogs, and the water they contain, are diamagnetic, or repelled by magnetic fields.)
Needless to say, FNEs are not funded, and most amount to nothing. After the frog, though, another FNE produced “gecko tape,” an adhesive inspired by a gecko’s feet. And then there was the one that started with using Scotch tape to rip thin layers of graphite, the material that comprises pencil lead. That low-tech affair culminated in the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, for Geim and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov’s production of graphene, a material one-hundred thousand times thinner than a human hair and two hundred times stronger than steel. It is flexible, more transparent than glass, and an excellent electrical conductor. Spiders fed graphene have spun silk many times tougher than the Kevlar in bulletproof vests. Graphene consists of carbon strips one atom thick, an arrangement previously considered purely theoretical. When Geim and Novoselov submitted their initial work to one of the world’s most prestigious journals, one reviewer said it was impossible, and another deemed it not “a sufficient scientific advance.”
Art historian Sarah Lewis studies creative achievement, and described Geim’s mindset as representative of the “deliberate amateur.” The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor. “A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,” Lewis wrote. When Geim was asked (two years before the Nobel) to describe his research style for a science newsletter, he offered this: “It is rather unusual, I have to say. I do not dig deep—I graze shallow. So ever since I was a postdoc, I would go into a different subject every five years or so. . . . I don’t want to carry on studying the same thing from cradle to grave. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.” Deviating from what Geim calls the “straight railway line” of life is “not secure . . . psychologically,” but comes with advantages, for motivation and for “questioning things people who work in that area never bother to ask.” His Friday evenings are like Smithies’s Saturday mornings; they balance the rest of the week’s standard practice with wide-roaming exploration. They embrace what Max Delbrück, a Nobel laureate who studied the intersection of physics and biology, called “the principle of limited sloppiness.” Be careful not to be too careful, Delbrück warned, or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.
Novoselov was Geim’s PhD student, taken on board after Geim’s colleague told him that Novoselov “seems to be wasting his life” in another lab. When Novoselov arrived, he found equipment that was similar to that in his previous lab, but “this flexibility and the opportunity to try yourself in different areas which was interesting.” A Science profile of him bore the section titles “Going for Breadth” and “Spread Thin,” which would sound really bad and like he was falling behind if the article wasn’t also about how at thirty-six he was the youngest physics Nobel laureate in forty years.
Like Van Gogh or Frances Hesselbein or hordes of young athletes, Novoselov probably looked from the outside like he was behind, until all of a sudden he very much wasn’t. He was lucky. He arrived in a workspace that treated mental meandering as a competitive advantage, not a pest to be exterminated in the name of efficiency.
That kind of protection from the cult of the head start is increasingly rare. At some point or other, we all specialize to one degree or another, so the rush to get there can seem logical. Fortunately, there are pioneers who are working to balance the cult of the head start. They want to have it all—the mental meandering along with the wisdom of deep experience; the broad conceptual skills that make use of Flynn’s scientific spectacles even within training programs for specialists; and the creative power of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. They want to reverse the Tiger trend, not just for themselves, but for everyone, and even in domains synonymous with hyperspecialization. The future of discovery, they argue, depends on it.
* * *
• • •
It only takes a few minutes of conversation to gather that Arturo Casadevall is a beaker-half-full kind of guy. One of the greatest days of his life was when gravitational waves were detected, and that’s not his field. “Two black holes collide in space a billion years ago, and for a billion years those gravity waves travel through space-time,” he narrated, eyes widening. “When the original signal began, life on Earth was unicellular, and in that time humanity manages to build two interferometers and measure it. I mean, what an accomplishment that is.” He is also an MD-PhD and a star in his own domains, microbiology and immunology. He has studied AIDS and anthrax, and has illuminated important aspects of how fungal diseases work. His “h-index,” a measure of a scientist’s productivity and how often they are cited, recently surpassed Albert Einstein’s.* So his peers took it seriously when he arrived at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2015, as chair of molecular microbiology and immunology, and warned that scientific research is in crisis.
In a lecture to his new colleagues, Casadevall declared that the pace of progress had slowed, while the rate of retractions in scientific literature had accelerated, proportionally outpacing the publication of new studies. “If this continues unabated,” he said, “the entire literature will be retracted in a few years.” It was science gallows humor, but grounded in data. Part of the problem, he argued, is that young scientists are rushed to specialize before they learn how to think; they end up unable to produce good work themselves and unequipped to spot bad (or fraudulent) work by their colleagues.
The reason Casadevall came to Hopkins, from a comfy post at New York City’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is that the new gig offered him the chance to create a prototype of what he thinks graduate science education, and eventually all education, should be.