Letters to a Young Scientist (7 page)
The principle I have drawn from this history is the following:
use but don’t love technology
. If you need it but find it at all forbiddingly difficult, recruit a better-prepared collaborator. Put the project first and, by any available and honorable means, complete and publish the results.
At the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science (ASMS), Allison Kam (left) and Hannah Waggerman examine environmental bacteria samples taken from the Mobile Delta. Photograph by John Hoyle.
H
OW ARE BORN SCIENTISTS
best discovered? There is a growing movement to identify secondary school students of promise and open to them special curricula that encourage talent. One example I know about personally is the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science in my home town of Mobile, which selects high school students from all over the state, provides them with scholarships, and settles them in a resident college-like campus. Immersed in laboratory research guided by experienced scientists, students learn in an atmosphere where a focus on science and technology is the norm. Virtually all of the graduates in a given year thus far have gone straight to college.
Few scientists write memoirs, and among those who do, even fewer are willing to disclose the emotions, urges, idols, and teachers that brought them into their scientific careers. In any case, I don’t trust most such accounts, not because the authors are dishonest, but because the scientific culture discourages such disclosures. Scientific researchers have a hard enough time avoiding any utterance that might sound childish, poetic, or dilatory and insubstantial to other scientists. Hence a leathery, just-the-facts style confines most personal accounts of scientific discovery, and a good story often comes out reticent and dull. False modesty is the peccadillo of the scientific memoirist.
An example (imaginary) might read as follows: “While working at the Whitehead Institute X-ray crystallography laboratory on avian muscle protein, I became fascinated with the classical problem of autonomous folding. I was led to consider . . .”
Well, I’m sure that such writers in real life were fascinated and even compelled to consider this or that, but not me reading their account. A reader would like to know the reason why they did the hard work to achieve their goal. Where was the adventure, what was the dream?
So there is a great deal we don’t know about what makes scientists, and how they really feel about their work. Without the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, would the elite students there all have gone to college and careers related to science?
Another question is whether it is more inspiring and useful for such students to work in small teams or on individual projects that each selects, however idiosyncratic. We have no clear answer to either of these questions. But I have no doubt that encouragement given teenagers who are already predisposed to scientific careers does help lead them to success in later years.
Basically this question about teams arises in the encouragement of innovation by practicing scientists. The conventional wisdom holds that science of the future will be more and more the product of “teamthink,” multiple minds put in close contact. It is certainly the case that fewer and fewer solitary authors publish research articles in premier journals such as
Nature
and
Science
. The number of coauthors is more often three or more; and in the case of a few subjects, such as experimental physics and genome analysis, where research by necessity involves an entire institution, the number sometimes soars to over a hundred.
Then there are the vaunted science and technology think tanks, where some of the best and brightest are brought together explicitly to create new ideas and products. I’ve visited the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, as well as the development divisions of Apple and Google, two of America’s corporate giants, and I admit I was very impressed with their futuristic ambience. At Google I even commented, “This is the university of the future.”
The idea in these places is to feed and house very smart people and let them wander about, meet in small groups over coffee and croissants, and bounce ideas off each other. And then, perhaps while strolling through well-manicured grounds or on their way to a gourmet lunch, they will experience the flash of epiphany. This surely works, especially if there is a problem in theoretical science already well formulated, or else a product in need of being designed.
But is groupthink the best way to create really new science? Risking heresy, I hereby dissent. I believe the creative process usually unfolds in a very different way. It arises and for a while germinates in a solitary brain. It commences as an idea and, equally important, the ambition of a single person who is prepared and strongly motivated to make discoveries in one domain of science or another. The successful innovator is favored by a fortunate combination of talent and circumstance, and is socially conditioned by family, friends, teachers, and mentors, and by stories of great scientists and their discoveries. He (or she) is sometimes driven, I will dare to suggest, by a passive-aggressive nature, and sometimes an anger against some part of society or problem in the world. There is also an introversion in the innovator that keeps him from team sports and social events. He dislikes authority, or at least being told what to do. He is not a leader in high school or college, nor is he likely to be pledged by social clubs. From an early age he is a dreamer, not a doer. His attention wanders easily. He likes to probe, to collect, to tinker. He is prone to fantasize. He is not inclined to focus. He will not be voted by his classmates most likely to succeed.
When prepared by education to conduct research, the most innovative scientists of my experience do so eagerly and with no prompting. They prefer to take first steps alone. They seek a problem to be solved, an important phenomenon previously overlooked, a cause-and-effect connection never imagined. An opportunity to be the first is their smell of blood.
On the frontier of modern science, however, multiple skills are almost always needed to bring any new idea to fruition. An innovator may add a mathematician or statistician, a computer expert, a natural-products chemist, one or several laboratory or field assistants, a colleague or two in the same specialty—whoever it takes for the project to succeed becomes a collaborator. The collaborator is often another innovator who has been toying with the same idea, and is prone to modify or add to it. A critical mass is achieved and discussion intensifies, perhaps among scientists in the same place, perhaps scattered around the world. The project moves forward until an original result is achieved. Group thought has brought it to fruition.
Innovator, creative collaborator, or facilitator: in the course of your successful career, you may well fill each of these roles at one time or another.
The author with sweep net looking at insects: Mobile, Alabama, 1942 (left), and the summit of Gorongosa Mountain, Mozambique, 2012 (right). Photographers: 1942, Ellis MacLeod; 2012, © Piotr Naskrecki.
A
PPROACHING THE END
of more than sixty years of research, I have been fortunate to have been given complete freedom in choosing my subjects. Because I no longer look to very much in the way of a future, and the fires of decent ambition have been accordingly damped, I can tell you, without the debilitating drag of false modesty, how and why some of my discoveries were made. I’d like you to think, as I thought early in my career of older scientists, “If he could do it, so can I, and maybe better.”
I started very young, even before my snake-handling triumph in Camp Pushmataha. Maybe you started young too, or else you are young and just starting. Back in 1938 when I was nine years old, my family moved from the Deep South to Washington, D.C. My father was called there for a two-year stint as an auditor in the Rural Electrification Administration, a Depression-era federal agency charged with bringing electric power to the rural South. I was an only child, but not especially lonely. Any kid that age can find a buddy or fit into some small neighborhood group, maybe at the risk of a fistfight with the alpha boy. (For years I carried scars on my upper lip and left brow.) Nevertheless, I was alone that first summer and was left to my own devices. No stifling piano lessons, no boring visits to relatives, no summer school, no guided tours, no television, no boys’ clubs, nothing. It was
wonderful
! I was enchanted at this time by Frank Buck movies I’d seen about his expeditions to distant jungles to capture wild animals. I also read
National Geographic
articles that told about the world of insects—big metallic-colored beetles and garish butterflies, also mostly from the tropics. I found an especially absorbing piece in a 1934 issue entitled “Ants, Savage and Civilized,” which led me to search for these insects—searches that were always successful due to the overwhelming abundance of ants everywhere I looked.
There were postage stamps to collect and comic books, of course, but also butterflies and ants. Nothing complicated about collecting and studying insects. For a while anyway, they served as my lions and tigers, not exactly big game snared in nets by a hundred native assistants, but nevertheless the real thing. Thus fired up, I put some bottles in a cloth bag and walked over to the nearby woods of Rock Creek Park on my first expedition, venturing into second-growth deciduous woodland crisscrossed by paths. I remember vividly the animals I brought home that day. They included a wolf spider and the red and green nymph of a long-horned grasshopper.
Subsequently I decided to add butterflies as my quarry. My stepmother made me a butterfly net. (I put together a lot of them in the years to follow. In case you would like to do the same, bend a wire coat hanger into a circular loop, straighten the hook, heat the hook until it can burn wood, then push it into the end of a sawed-off broomstick. Finally, sew a net of cheesecloth or mosquito netting around the hoop.)
Thus accoutered, my butterfly collection grew furiously. Early in this career of mine, my best friend Ellis MacLeod, who years later was to be a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, told me he had seen a medium-sized butterfly, black with brilliant red stripes across both wings, fluttering back and forth around the bushes in front of his apartment building. We found a book on butterflies and identified it as Red Admiral. The book was the beginning of my library on insects. At this point my mother, living with her second husband in Louisville, Kentucky, sent me a larger, beautifully illustrated book on butterflies. It threw me into confusion. The only familiar species I found in it was the Cabbage White, a species accidentally introduced from Europe many years previously. The reason for my confusion, I learned later, was the book was about British butterflies.
My future was set. Ellis and I agreed we were going to be entomologists when we grew up. We delved into college-level textbooks, which we could scarcely read, although we tried very hard. One that we checked out from a public library and worked on page by page was Robert E. Snodgrass’s formidable
Principles of Insect Morphology
, published in 1935. Only later did I learn that grown-up biologists were using it as a technical reference book. We visited the insect collections on display at the awesome National Museum of Natural History, aware that professional entomologists were curators there. I never saw one of these demigods (one was Snodgrass himself), but just knowing they were there as part of the
United States government
gave me hope that one day I might ascend to this unimaginably high level.
Returning in 1940 with my family to Mobile, I plunged into the rich new fauna of butterflies. The semitropical climate and nearby swamps were a close realization of my earlier dreams. To the red admirals, painted ladies, great spangled fritillaries, and mourning cloaks characteristic of the more northern climes I added snout butterflies, Gulf fritillaries, Brazilian skippers, great purple hairstreaks, and several magnificent swallowtails—giant, zebra, and spicebush.
Then I turned to ants, monomaniacally determined to find every kind living in the weed-grown vacant lot next to our large family house on Charleston Street. I didn’t know the scientific names of the species, but I do now, and the location of every colony in the quarter-acre space is vivid in my memory: the Argentine ant (
Linepithema humile
), which nested in the rotting wooden fence at the edge of the lot in the winter and spread out among the weeds during the warm months; large black ants (
Odontomachus
brunneus
) with snapping jaws and vicious stings, which inhabited a pile of roof shingles at the far corner beneath a fig tree; a huge mound-dwelling colony of the red imported fire ant (
Solenopsis invicta
) that I found at the edge of the lot next to the street; and a colony of a tiny yellow species (
Pheidole floridana
) nesting beneath an old whiskey bottle.
Three years later, as nature counselor at Pushmataha, I transitioned into a snake period, and began catching as many as I could find of the dozens of species that inhabit southwestern Alabama.
I’ve gone into this boyhood story to make a point that may be relevant to your own career trajectory.
I have never changed
.