What Nobel Laureates and Elite Athletes Have in Common
Short-term results can undermine long-term development
Welcome to Range Widely, the newsletter for generalists — where I'll help you step outside your lane for a few minutes each week. You can subscribe here:
The comments have been awesome so far. If you left one before today, I've responded. Please feel welcome to join the conversation!
*******************************************************************
This week, the Nobel Prizes are announced, so I want to share something that Nobel laureates have in common with elite athletes. If you can’t wait for that tidbit, you can skip down to the aptly named section. Otherwise, let’s start with a problem:
In a 2017 essay, a trio of scientists highlighted a troubling trend with Nobel Prizes. On a near-annual basis, a newly minted laureate explains that their breakthrough could not have occurred in today’s research climate.
Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi, who won a Nobel Prize for illuminating how damaged cells are cleaned out, said this in his 2016 acceptance speech:
“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.”
In order to secure funding, researchers are increasingly pressured to know what they’re going to find — and how it can be used — before they find it, and that’s not the way major breakthroughs tend to happen.
In 1945, former MIT dean Vannevar Bush, who oversaw U.S. military science during World War II — which included the Manhattan Project and mass production of penicillin — wrote a report for President Franklin Roosevelt in which he explained successful innovation culture.
The report was titled “Science, the Endless Frontier,” and it led to the creation of the National Science Foundation, which funded three generations of wildly successful scientific discovery, from web browsers to MRIs. Bush wrote:
“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
The greater the pressure for short-term results, the less incentive for the “free play” that Bush described, or for engaging in Ohsumi’s unpredictable work.
The Challenge in Congress
In 2006, when I was just starting in journalism, I sat in on the funding policy hearings of a U.S. Senate subcommittee on science and space, chaired by Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Hutchison would start hearings by reading aloud the titles of proposals that scientists had written for research funding. If a title did not concern the creation of a new commercial technology, she held it up for the room and asked how this would help get the United States ahead of other countries.
Hutchison criticized disciplines that she argued often distract from the innovation race — among those she named: biology, geology, economics, and archaeology. International competition was intensifying, while research funding was slowly declining as a portion of the federal budget, which led politicians to emphasize research with clearly marketable applications.
I wonder how Hutchison might have assessed the early work of Louis Pasteur on chickens with cholera, which led to lab-created vaccines. Or Einstein’s whimsical idea to investigate if time passes differently in high versus low gravity, part of a theory essential to some pretty useful technology — like cell phones. (They use GPS with gravitationally adjusted clocks that sync with clocks on Earth.)
For a more recent example, consider the work of biochemist Katalin Karikó. Karikó studies messenger RNA, or mRNA, a molecule that carries instructions to cells so they can produce proteins. For years, her work seemed more like a curiosity than a basis for important applications. She struggled for research funding, and regularly had none at all.
“She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful,” according to a New York Times profile. “She did not get them, even as more mundane research was rewarded.” As her collaborator Drew Weissman put it: “The people who reviewed the grants said mRNA will not be a good therapeutic, so don’t bother.”
Today, mRNA is the foundation for Covid-19 vaccines and Karikó is being hailed as a prescient genius. (The Nobel Prize for chemistry is announced tomorrow, and I'm very curious to see if she gets it.)
Federal funding for research is intertwined with politics. Thus, the ever-present and tricky balance: “governments demand relevance; scientists desire freedom.”
The Challenge in Industry
In 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology was tasked with writing a 21st century version of Vannevar Bush’s report about impactful research culture. The new report, “Transformation and Enterprise,” highlighted the decreasing ability of private companies to engage in long-term research that probes curiosities without immediate applications.
Bell Labs, for example, was founded by AT&T in 1925 to produce new technologies for telephone companies — but researchers there famously had wide latitude to follow their curiosity wherever it led. Work at Bell Labs resulted in nine Nobel Prizes, including one for inventing the transistor, which helped launch the digital age. At the start of the 21st century, however, Bell Labs underwent enormous cuts; focus shifted to smaller, incremental technologies that could be applied immediately. Bell Labs as a hub of innovation disappeared.
The “Transformation and Enterprise” report uses Bell Labs as an example of the decline of pioneering corporate labs more generally. The two main causes, according to the report, both accelerated in the early 1990s: 1) fierce global competition has made companies less willing to invest in risky research, and more interested in immediate commercial applications; 2) increasing emphasis on shareholder value has made research with more than a 3-5 year time horizon difficult to justify.
Essentially, corporate labs are more inclined toward predictable advances. Meanwhile, research on research shows that breakthroughs aren’t easy to predict. Trying to predict them and fund accordingly, in fact, might exactly backfire.
What Nobel Laureates and Elite Athletes Have in Common
Nobel-worthy breakthroughs take time, risk, and willingness to follow a meandering path — to detour in light of “unforeseen small findings,” as Yoshinori Ohsumi put it. Nobel laureates, too, require long-term development.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about a new study on the childhoods of elite athletes. Bottom line: athletes who went on to become the best adults did a wider variety of activities in childhood, and initially progressed more slowly than the best youth athletes — who more often specialized early and peaked early.
That study also referenced Nobel laureates. Specifically, a 2015 paper on Nobel laureates found that — compared to high-achieving but non-Nobel peers — Nobel laureates were more likely to do multidisciplinary work early in their careers, and to progress more slowly early on.
“Nobel laureates were less likely to have won a scholarship as a student and took significantly longer to earn full professorships...Taken together, the observations suggest that early multidisciplinary practice is associated with gradual initial discipline specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.”
Pressure for short-term development of people, then, may ultimately curtail breakthrough innovation — just like pressure for short-term results in research.
I think we need all kinds of research, with all kinds of time horizons. The danger, as highlighted in “Transformation and Enterprise,” would be if all the pressure and incentives increasingly align for the short-term. How, then, do we get mRNA vaccines?
This year, if another Nobel laureate uses their platform to challenge the current funding climate — if they highlight the way that a short-term-results orientation limits exploration — I hope the research-funding world listens.
David’s Digressions
-Katalin Karikó’s daughter, Susan Francia, is a two-time Olympic rowing champion. This got me curious if there has ever been a nuclear family that included a Nobel laureate and Olympic gold medalist. So I asked the man who might have such a stat on the top of his head: my friend Bill Mallon — eminent surgeon, former pro golfer, Olympics historian, and all-around most interesting man in the world. Here’s a summary of what Bill had for me:
Philip Noel-Baker is the only person to have won an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize.
Niels Bohr was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He intellectually sparred with Einstein, and won a Nobel in 1922 for illuminating the structure of atoms. His brother, Harald, won a silver medal as part of the 1908 Danish soccer team. His nephew, Ernest, competed for Denmark in field hockey at the 1948 Olympics.
In total, the database that Bill and others created lists nine Olympians who are closely related to a Nobel laureate.
-In other my-friend news, my friend Safi Bahcall was a member of the working group that prepared the “Transformation and Enterprise” report. Safi has been a physicist and biotech entrepreneur, and he’s the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. A great read for a deeper dive on breakthrough innovation.
-Nobel-laureate scientists are a lot more likely than their peers to have hobbies (usually artistic) unrelated to their work. The most successful experts have expansive curiosity. “To him who observes them from afar,” wrote Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”
Thanks for reading. Until next week…
David
p.s. If you liked today’s post, please consider sharing it! You can find it (and other posts) here.