* * *
• • •
Casadevall’s overarching point is that the innovation ecosystem should intentionally preserve range and inefficiency. He is fighting an uphill battle.
In 2006, when I was starting in journalism, I sat in on funding policy hearings of a U.S. Senate subcommittee on science and space, chaired by Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Hutchison would thumb through a stack of scientists’ research proposals and read the titles aloud. If a title did not directly pertain to the creation of a new commercial technology, she whisked it from the stack and asked the room how exactly that sort of thing would help the country get ahead of India and China. Among the disciplines Hutchison classified as distracting from technological innovation were biology, geology, economics, and archaeology. One can only guess how she would have assessed the work of Louis Pasteur (who started as an artist) on chickens with cholera, which led him to lab-created vaccines. Or Einstein’s fanciful idea to investigate if time passes differently in high versus low gravity, part of a theory essential to some rather useful technology, like cell phones, which use global positioning satellites with gravitationally adjusted clocks that sync with clocks on Earth.
In 1945, former MIT dean Vannevar Bush, who oversaw U.S. military science during World War II—including the mass production of penicillin and the Manhattan Project—authored a report at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt in which he explained successful innovation culture. It was titled “Science, the Endless Frontier,” and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation that funded three generations of wildly successful scientific discovery, from Doppler radar and fiber optics to web browsers and MRIs. “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
A curious phenomenon has appeared in recent years on a near-annual basis when the Nobel Prizes are awarded. Someone who receives one explains that their breakthrough could not have occurred today. In 2016, Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi closed his Nobel lecture ominously: “Truly original discoveries in science are often triggered by unpredictable and unforeseen small findings. . . . Scientists are increasingly required to provide evidence of immediate and tangible applications of their work.” That is head start fervor come full circle; explorers have to pursue such narrowly specialized goals with such hyperefficiency that they can say what they will find before they look for it.
Like Casadevall, Ohsumi knows that applications are the end goal, but the question is how best to get there. There is no shortage of institutions focused tightly on applications. A few appeared in this book. Why specialize the entire research world that way? The “free play” of intellects sounds horribly inefficient, just like the free play of developing soccer players who could always instead be drilling specific skills. It’s just that when someone actually takes the time to study how breakthroughs occur, or how the players who grew up to fill Germany’s 2014 World Cup winning team developed, “these players performed less organized practice . . . but greater proportions of playing activities.”
At its core, all hyperspecialization is a well-meaning drive for efficiency—the most efficient way to develop a sports skill, assemble a product, learn to play an instrument, or work on a new technology. But inefficiency needs cultivating too. The wisdom of a Polgar-like method of laser-focused, efficient development is limited to narrowly constructed, kind learning environments.
“When you push the boundaries, a lot of it is just probing. It has to be inefficient,” Casadevall told me. “What’s gone totally is that time to talk and synthesize. People grab lunch and bring it into their offices. They feel lunch is inefficient, but often that’s the best time to bounce ideas and make connections.”
When engineer Bill Gore left DuPont to form the company that invented Gore-Tex, he fashioned it after his observation that companies do their most impactful creative work in a crisis, because the disciplinary boundaries fly out the window. “Communication really happens in the carpool,” he once said. He made sure that “dabble time” was a cultural staple.
CONCLUSION
Expanding Your Range
WHEN I BEGAN to write and speak about data indicating that athletes who go on to become elite are usually not early specializers, the reactions (particularly from parents) reliably fell into two categories: (1) Simple disbelief, can’t be true; and (2) “So, in one sentence, what is the advice?” What one sentence of advice can encapsulate the embrace of breadth and the journey of experimentation that is necessary if you want, like Van Gogh or Andre Geim or Frances Hesselbein, to arrive at a place optimized for you alone? Like the paths of those individuals, my exploration of breadth and specialization was inefficient, and what began as a search for one sentence of advice ended in this book.
Told in retrospect for popular media, stories of innovation and self-discovery can look like orderly journeys from A to B. Sort of like how inspirational-snippet accounts of the journeys of elite athletes appear straightforward, but the stories usually get murkier when examined in depth or over time. The popular notion of the Tiger path minimizes the role of detours, breadth, and experimentation. It is attractive because it is a tidy prescription, low on uncertainty and high on efficiency. After all, who doesn’t like a head start? Experimentation is not a tidy prescription, but it is common, and it has advantages, and it requires more than the typical motivational-poster lip service to a tolerance for failure. Breakthroughs are high variance.
Creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton has shown that the more work eminent creators produced, the more duds they churned out, and the higher their chances of a supernova success. Thomas Edison held more than a thousand patents, most completely unimportant, and was rejected for many more. His failures were legion, but his successes—the mass-market light bulb, the phonograph, a precursor to the film projector—were earthshaking. Sandwiched between King Lear and Macbeth, Shakespeare quilled Timon of Athens. Sculptor Rachel Whiteread achieved a feat akin to Geim’s Ig Nobel/Nobel double: she was the first woman ever to win the Turner Prize—a British award for the best artistic production of the year—and also the “Anti-Turner Prizer” for the worst British artist. And she won them in the same year. When I was researching the history of video games to write about Nintendo, I learned that a now-psychotherapist named Howard Scott Warshaw was once an Atari video game designer who used extremely constrained technology in a resourceful way to make the sci-fi game Yar’s Revenge. It was the bestselling original title for Atari’s 2600 console during the early-1980s when Atari became the fastest-growing company in U.S. history. The very same year, Warshaw designed the Atari adaptation of the film E.T. Again, he experimented with limited technology. This time, the game flopped so badly that it was pronounced the biggest commercial failure in video game history and blamed for the near-overnight demise of all of Atari Inc.*