The commercial fate of Broadway during any particular era, be it unusually prosperous or exceptionally flop-ridden, had less to do with specific famous names and more to do with whether collaborators mixed and matched vibrantly. The 1920s featured dozens of shows with Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein (albeit not yet in collaboration), and also an unusually high overall flop rate of 90 percent for new shows. It was an era of stagnant teams, rife with repeat collaborations and scant boundary crossing.
New collaborations allow creators “to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they’re suddenly seen as invention,” said sociologist Brian Uzzi, Amaral’s collaborator. Human creativity, he said, is basically an “import/export business of ideas.”
Uzzi documented an import/export trend that began in both the physical and social sciences in the 1970s, pre-internet: more successful teams tended to have more far-flung members. Teams that included members from different institutions were more likely to be successful than those that did not, and teams that included members based in different countries had an advantage as well.
Consistent with the import/export model, scientists who have worked abroad—whether or not they returned—are more likely to make a greater scientific impact than those who have not. The economists who documented that trend suggested one reason could be migrants’ “arbitrage” opportunities, the chance to take an idea from one market and bring it to another where it is more rare and valued.* It echoes Oliver Smithies’s advice to bring new skills to an old problem, or a new problem to old skills. The atypical combination of typical forms—say, hip-hop, a Broadway musical, and American historical biography—is not a strategy fluke of showbiz.
Uzzi and a team analyzed eighteen million papers from a variety of scientific domains to see whether atypical knowledge combinations mattered. If a particular paper cited other areas of research that rarely, if ever, appeared together, then it was classified as having used an atypical combination of knowledge. Most papers relied purely on conventional combinations of previous knowledge. That is, they cited work from other journals that often appeared together in other studies’ lists of references. The “hit” papers, those that over the next decade were used by a huge number of other scientists, featured ample conventional combinations, but also added an injection of unusual knowledge combinations.
A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers.
To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.
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Casadevall leads by example. A single conversation with him is liable to include Anna Karenina, the Federalist Papers, the fact that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were philosophers as well as scientists, why the Roman Empire wasn’t more innovative, and a point about mentoring in the form of a description of the character Mentor from Homer’s Odyssey. “I work at it,” he said, smirking. “I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”
One of Casadevall’s projects was born from a news article he read about a robot sent into the Chernobyl nuclear accident site, still highly contaminated thirty years post-disaster. The article happened to mention that the robot returned with some black mold, a kind that resembled a grotty shower curtain and that had colonized the abandoned reactor. “So, why black mold?” Casadevall asked rhetorically. “And then one thing led to another.” He and colleagues made a remarkable find—that the mold was nourishing itself with radiation. Not with radioactive substances—with radiation itself.
Casadevall makes sure to highlight experiences outside the lab and how they contributed to who he is today. His family fled Cuba and arrived in Queens when he was eleven. At sixteen, he got his first job, at McDonald’s, and worked there until he was twenty. It’s still on his résumé, and he made sure to discuss it in his Johns Hopkins interview. “It was a great, great experience,” he told me. “I learned a lot working there.” Like handling pressure. His younger brother worked there, too, and was briefly taken hostage during a holdup. “He spent two days on the witness stand where the lawyers made fun of his accent,” Casadevall recalled. “He came out ready for law school. Now he’s a successful trial lawyer.” After McDonald’s, Casadevall worked as a bank teller. (“That was held up too!”) His father wanted him to have something practical to fall back on, so a community college degree in pest control operations hangs on his office wall, near a certificate of his election into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine.
Casadevall is renowned in his area of expertise. He has no trouble getting research grants, and is frequently one of the scientists who helps determine who else gets grants. He is a winner if the specialization status quo continues. And yet he considers his attempt to shatter it the most important work of his life. The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.
Laszlo Polgar, in the midst of his chess experiment with his daughters, proclaimed that “the problems of cancer and AIDS” would more likely be solved if his system of narrow specialization and efficient education were used beyond chess, to educate a thousand kids. Casadevall is a student of innovation history. He grew up as a doctor and scientist when HIV/AIDS exploded into an epidemic, and he could hardly disagree more passionately. “When I went to medical school, I was taught that there were no human diseases caused by retroviruses, that retroviruses were a curiosity that occurred in some animal tumors. In 1981, a new disease emerges that nobody knows anything about. In 1984, it’s found to be a retrovirus, HIV. In 1987, you have the first therapy. In 1996, you have such effective therapy that people don’t have to die of it anymore. How did that happen? Was it because companies all of a sudden rushed to make drugs? No. If you really look back and analyze it, before that time society had spent some of its very hard-earned money to study a curiosity called retroviruses. Just a curiosity in animals. So by the time HIV was found to be a retrovirus, you already knew that if you interfered with the protease [a type of enzyme] that you could deactivate it. So when HIV arrived, society had right off the shelf a huge amount of knowledge from investments made in a curiosity that at the time had no use. It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer’s disease, you would never get to the solution. But the answer to Alzheimer’s disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it’s a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.”