"Communication Really Happens in the Carpool..."

The latest Nobel Prize is a testament to the importance of serendipitous collisions

A portrait of Hungarian-American scientist Katalin Karikó on a wall in Budapest, by "The Colorful City" artist group. [credit: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images]

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman met in 1998. Waiting in line at the University of Pennsylvania to use a photocopier, they got to chatting.

Karikó had been working on using messenger RNA (mRNA) — which ferries DNA instructions around cells to where proteins are made — to prompt the body to fight illness, particularly heart disease and stroke. Her work was unorthodox, with no immediate applications, and she struggled to get support.

Weissman was new at Penn, and interested in whether mRNA might be used to make a vaccine against H.I.V. But he didn’t know how to make and use mRNA molecules, so he wasn’t working on it. Until the photocopier.

“I had always wanted to try mRNA,” Weissman said later, “and here was somebody at the Xerox machine telling me that’s what she does.” And as Karikó said: “I knew little immunology and vaccine biology at the time; I learned most of it from Drew.”

It was a fruitful match. Today, the duo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work, which ultimately led to the development of effective Covid-19 vaccines. (mRNA vaccines are currently being tested in everything from pancreatic cancer to flu.)

The Karikó/Weissman story reminds me of the engineer Bill Gore, who founded the company that created 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,” Gore once said.

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Where is the carpool these days, though? Not just the literal carpool, but the figurative one.

Back when I was researching Range, I interviewed Johns Hopkins chair of molecular microbiology and immunology Arturo Casadevall — a huge proponent of interdisciplinary research — and he told me this:

“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.”

Casadevall tells people in his lab to read something outside their field every day:

“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.”

With more remote and hybrid work, I think we probably have to be more thoughtful about creating connections — to new people and new ideas. I don’t think it means we can’t do it, but perhaps we can’t rely on water-cooler or photocopier serendipity to the extent we might have in the past.

Perhaps we can use tactics like the “Monday Notes” NASA employed in the lead up to the moon landing. Or, as Dan Coyle told me, “fill the bleachers” in remote meetings — bring in people who aren’t directly involved but might learn something from observing.

Economist Ed Glaeser’s work on cities has shown that ideas spread easily and quickly in dense environments, leading to perpetual innovation. Sociologist Brian Uzzi has found that 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.” Human creativity, he said, is basically an “import/export business of ideas.”

Given the importance of happenstance idea collisions, we should be strategic about cultivating that import/export business of ideas. One neat example that sticks in my head: at a large hospital where I spent some time doing interviews, interns were proactively used as cross-pollinators; they were moved around surgical teams, and told to share information about what they observed between groups.

If you have ideas, or have tried things at your own workplace, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Aside from their pathbreaking work, there’s a lot to learn from Karikó and Weissman’s curiosity, collaboration, and persistence.

If you’re interested in more, here’s an excellent (relatively technical) interview with Karikó. My favorite quote, in an answer about how she made a particular breakthrough:

“One of my hobbies is reading really old scientific papers.”

In one of my early newsletter posts, I wrote about Karikó’s work, and the challenge of getting support for work that doesn’t have an immediate application. In that post, I also noted that Karikó’s daughter Susan Francia is a two-time Olympic rowing champion.

I asked surgeon/ex-pro golfer/Olympic historian Bill Mallon if any other Olympic medalists were related to Nobel laureates. Bill informed me that Niels Bohr’s brother was a silver medalist in soccer (and his nephew was an Olympian in field hockey), and that Philip Noel-Baker is the only person to have won an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize. You can see the full list of laureates related to Olympians here, compiled by Bill and colleagues.

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Until next time…

David