Success and Creativity in Scientific Research

Amaze Your Friends and Surprise Yourself

David S. Sholl

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000356908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Long-term success in scientific research requires skills that go well beyond technical prowess. Success and Creativity in Scientific Research: Amaze Your Friends and Surprise Yourself is based on a popular series of lectures the author has given to PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Both entertaining and thought-provoking, this essential work supports advanced students and early career professionals across a variety of technical disciplines to thrive as successful and innovative researchers.

Features:

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• Discusses habits needed to find deep satisfaction in research, systematic and proven methods for generating good ideas, strategies for effective technical writing, and making compelling presentations

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• Uses a conversational tone, making extensive use of anecdotes from scientific luminaries to engage readers

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• Provides actionable methods to help readers achieve long-term career success

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• Offers memorable examples to illustrate general principles

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• Features topics relevant to researchers in all disciplines of science and engineering

This book is aimed at students and early career professionals who want to achieve the satisfaction of performing creative and impactful research in any area of science or engineering.

1

How to Become an Overnight Success

Success in short track speed skating requires high levels of technical skill and incredible athleticism. In February 2002, the Olympic final of men’s short track speed skating featured several bona fide stars, including Apolo Ohno, who was favored to win a gold medal skating for the USA. The race also included a 28-year-old Australian called Stephen Bradbury who was essentially unknown outside of speed skating. As the racers came into the final turn, Bradbury was well behind the leaders and out of medal contention. In the blink of an eye, one of the lead skaters fell and slid off the track, taking the rest of the pack with him in a tangle of skates and limbs. Bradbury was the last man standing and he coasted the last meters to the finish line, his hands above his head in delight and disbelief. He had won an Olympic gold medal.

Bradbury’s victory wasn’t just an unlikely sporting event; it was the first time an athlete from the Southern Hemisphere had won a gold medal in any event at the Winter Olympics. Instead of simply being an item of sports trivia, the nature of Bradbury’s triumph was a “you have to see this” moment that transfixed people around the globe. Overnight, Stephen Bradbury went from being unknown in his sports-mad homeland to being a national hero.

In many areas of science and culture, the longest lasting form of fame is to have your name associated with an important phenomenon or discovery. Think of Schrödinger’s cat, Fermat’s Last Theorem or the Krebs cycle. Stephen Bradbury’s Olympic medal brought him this kind of linguistic immortality, at least in Australia, where the phrase “doing a Bradbury” is now used to describe someone achieving amazing and unexpected success. I suspect that most people who are entering a career of scientific research or similar creative pursuits quietly dream of “doing a Bradbury”. Perhaps this would mean overturning a long-established scientific consensus or curing a dreaded disease or unlocking one of nature’s secrets that will change how people view the world forever.

This chapter looks at a deceptively simple question: what does it take to become an overnight success in the world of research? Among others, we will meet a Nobel Prize winner, a doctor who developed a world-changing therapy and a college dropout who founded a company valued at over $10 billion. There is no “magic formula” for achieving scientific fame and fortune, but the commonalities and contrasts between these impressive individuals point towards some truths about achieving spectacular success in science that can greatly help you in your career.

Then and Now – Marco Polo, Alfred Russel Wallace and Grumpy Cat

Spending time thinking about history is a powerful way to appreciate life in the modern world, with innovations like indoor plumbing, drinkable water and reliable heating. It is also striking just how long it took for things to happen in the past. The life of Marco Polo is a dramatic example of this observation. In 1271, Marco Polo left the city of Venice with his father and uncle to travel and trade in what is now known as central Asia and China. Although these regions were already inhabited by sophisticated cultures, they were entirely unknown to Europeans. After almost two and half decades of continual travel, he returned to Venice for the first time, presumably looking forward to telling stories about his adventures and enjoying his riches. Unfortunately for Marco Polo, his city was in the midst of a war. In the year after he returned home, he was taken prisoner in Genoa, where he was held for three years. During this time, Marco Polo dictated a book about his life that we now know in English translation as The Travels of Marco Polo. In 1299, 28 years after he first left Venice, Marco Polo was released from prison and his book was published. In today’s world, we could imagine that the book would rise rapidly up bestseller lists and propel its author to international fame. In a sense, this did happen, but much more slowly. It wasn’t until well into the 1300s that The Travels of Marco Polo became widely available and read, spurring interest in trade routes between Europe and the Far East and ultimately making Marco Polo a household name. In 2014, Netflix spent $200 million dollars to make a series called simply Marco Polo. Critics savaged the series, and it seems that audiences weren’t too thrilled either, because the series was cancelled after its second season. But ask yourself, how much money is someone going to spend in the future to make a fictionalized TV series based on your life story?

To find a parallel with Marco Polo’s adventures in the history of science, it is hard to look beyond the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace was born in 1823, a time when becoming a scientist didn’t just mean being white and male (“qualifications” that Wallace met) but also required being born into a wealthy family. Wallace came from a modest background. He determined that the only way to pursue his intellectual interests was to travel to distant lands and collect exotic specimens he could then sell. This plan was put into action in 1848 when the 25-year-old Wallace sailed to Brazil to collect samples and sketch animals and plants. After four years of collecting and sketching he boxed up everything he had accumulated and boarded a ship for the long voyage home. Twenty-six days into the journey disaster struck when the boat caught fire. Wallace had to watch from a lifeboat as his hard-won collection burned and then sank. His efforts had been for naught, and Wallace and the ship’s crew were lucky to escape alive.

In 1854, Wallace left the shores of England again, this time traveling to the Malay Archipelago. He spent the next eight years exploring what is now Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Aided by as many as 100 assistants from the local population, he amassed a truly astonishing collection of more than 80,000 beetles and more than 40,000 other specimens, many from species that had never been recorded by scientists before. This means that he added, on average, more than 25 beetles every day for eight years to his collection. Most people I know would be happy to see fewer than 25 beetles in a year, so this devotion to cataloging the world of beetles is quite impressive.

In the 12 years since Wallace first left England, he hadn’t simply been collecting beetles. He had also been thinking deeply about what he had seen. He identified what is now known as the Wallace Line, a geographic boundary that threads through the Malay Archipelago separating regions populated by completely different groups of animals. Some observations of this phenomenon had been made as early as the 1520s by the Italian explorer Antonio Pigafetta, but Wallace made the demarcation of the line more precise and, more importantly, came up with an explanation for its existence. Wallace independently developed the theory of evolution, which was being worked on at the same time by Charles Darwin. Wallace’s early writing on his ideas prompted Darwin to finish and publish his own On the Origin of Species, one of the most famous scientific books of all time. Wallace’s extensive field observations and his origination of what is now called biogeography made him an intellectual leader in the 19th-century science.

Remarkably, Wallace’s work was part of not one but two scientific revolutions. Shortly after Wallace’s death in 1911, Alfred Wegener proposed that the existence of identical fossil species on opposite sides of the Atlantic could have resulted from movement of continents over vast spans of time. The biogeographical boundaries that Wallace had established could also be explained with the same ideas. For many years, Wegener’s concept was considered to be speculative, if not heretical, by most geologists. In the 1960s, careful measurements of ocean floors provided direct evidence that Wegener was right – the continents separated by the Atlantic Ocean were slowing drifting apart. Today, the role of evolution in the characteristics of life on Earth and the role of plate tectonics in shaping the continents we live on are foundations of modern science.

The Internet-fueled, social media-saturated world we live in today makes the decades that Marco Polo and Alfred Russel Wallace spent in obscurity seem labored and tedious. The dour expression of the feline known as Grumpy Cat is a prime example. Five months after her birth in 2012, a picture of Grumpy Cat’s now famous downturned mouth was posted on Reddit, where it rapidly enraptured fans around the world. Six months after first appearing on Reddit, Grumpy Cat attended the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where she was reportedly more popular with crowds than luminaries such as Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX. Months later, a book “written” by Grumpy Cat appeared, debuting at number 8 on the Publishers Weekly hardcover list. Publicity for the book included an “interview” in Forbes magazine. In 2014, Grumpy Cat cemented her status as a cultural icon by appearing on the season finale of the popular TV show The Bachelorette. When Grumpy Cat passed away in 2019, her death made headlines around the world.

Grumpy Cat is just one of many examples of what might be called fame at the speed of the Internet. In 2015 the parents of an enthusiastic young boy called Ryan began posting videos of him unwrapping toys on YouTube. If you are not closely related to someone under the age of seven, it is very unlikely you have ever watched one of Ryan’s videos or even heard of him. But by 2017, Ryan’s YouTube channel, Ryan ToysReview, was one of YouTube’s most watched channels for months in a row. As of this writing, the video of 3-year-old Ryan imaginatively titled “GIANT Lightning McQueen Egg Surprise with 100+ Disney Cars” has been watched almost a billion times.

Most would agree that the “accomplishments” of Grumpy Cat or Ryan ToysReview are not analogous to world-changing scientific innovations. But the ubiquity of viral videos and other trappings of Internet culture can contribute to the sense that making a big splash in the world shouldn’t take years of anonymous labor. This is not a new idea in scientific culture. A longstanding trope in mathematics and theoretical physics is that the ability of “geniuses” to make breakthroughs diminishes rapidly after the age of 30. Paul Dirac, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 at the age of 31, captured this idea in a gloomy verse:

• Age is, of course, a fever chill
• that every physicist must fear.
• He’s better dead than living still
• when once he’s past his thirtieth year.

A modern day Dirac would probably be advised to use more gender inclusive language, or perhaps more prudently to simply skip poetry and stick to physics. Fortunately for the mental health of researchers everywhere, empirical research doesn’t support Dirac’s idea. One extensive study of Nobel Prize winners and similar innovators estimated that in today’s world, a 50 year old has about 2.5 times more “innovation potential” than a 30 year old and that a 30 year old and a 60 year old have about the same potential to make a world-changing breakthrough. In the rest of the chapter, we look at several modern researchers who have achieved remarkable success and how long it took them to reach this state.

Fiona Wood and Spray-on Skin

Each year the Australian government designates a single Australian as the “Australian of the Year”. In 2005, just a few years after Stephen Bradbury’s stunning Olympic success, the Australian of the Year award went to a biomedical researcher and clinician, Dr. Fiona Wood.¹ As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Dr. Wood was also voted the “most trusted Australian” every year from 2005 to 2010 in a Reader’s Digest poll. Despite these accolades, Dr. Wood is the kind of doctor you definitely hope not to see as a patient – she is a plastic surgeon who specializes in treating patients with severe burns.

In her medical work, Dr. Wood was exposed daily to the pain experienced by burn victims and the laborious nature of treating burns with skin grafts. In the early 1990s, she started developing methods for rapidly applying layers of cells that could promote burn healing. Within a few years, the first tests of what became known as “spray-on skin” took place. In 2002 a terrorist bombing in Bali left many people horribly burned. Dr. Wood vaulted into the consciousness of the Australian public by successfully treating many victims of this bombing using a combination of spray-on skin and more conventional therapies.

Looking back on technical advances can easily convey a retrospective sense of inevitability. It is worth learning more about Dr. Wood’s background to appreciate that her success probably seemed less than inevitable as she was achieving it. Fiona Wood was born in Yorkshire in 1958 in a home where neither of her parents had finished high school. Her parents encouraged her to pursue her education, a path that led her to medical school and training as a surgeon. In 1987 Dr. Wood, her husband (also a surgeon) and their two young children moved to Perth in Western Australia. During the years from which spray-on skin emerged, Dr. Wood completed her training as a plastic surgeon, maintained an active clinical practice and also had four more children. Next time you feel like you are a little short on time, pause and think about what life must have been like in the Wood family! Looking back over her career, Dr. Wood has given credit to advice from her poorly educated Yorkshire father, who said “The harder you work the luckier you get”. She has also noted that “Things don’t always go how you’d expect all the time. You have to pick yourself up and keep going. That’s part of life”.

1 Dr. Wood is not the only scientist to win this award. The first Australian of the Year, in 1960, was Nobel Prize winner Macfarlane Burnet. Four other scientists have won the award since.

How long did it take for Fiona Wood to achieve success? By the time she moved to Australia in 1987, she had already completed multiple years of medical training. Twelve years later, in 1999, Dr. Wood cofounded a company to bring spray-on skin into widespread medical use. In 2017, 30 years after moving her young family to Perth, the company, now called Avita Medical, received FDA approval for its first therapy, a product called ReCell. Although no one would accuse Dr. Wood of being an overnight success, it seems likely that spray-on skin will indeed reduce the suffering of many burn victims in the future.

Lineages of Successful Scientific Papers

I am fortunate in my position at Georgia Tech to be surrounded by many incredibly creative and successful researchers. To delve into how long it can take ideas to incubate, I dug into the history of several of my colleagues’ most notable papers. To warm up to this task, I started a paper from my own research group, not because my paper is especially insightful compared to the work of my colleagues but because I had lived the history myself. In 2002, then PhD student Anastasios Skoulidas, undergraduate student David Ackerman, my collaborator and friend Karl Johnson and myself published a paper in Physical Review Letters that described how fast molecules could move (or more precisely, diffuse) inside the tiny channels of carbon nanotubes. We showed that molecules could diffuse thousands of times faster than in any similar material, an outcome that was so surprising that we delayed writing the paper for quite some time while we checked and rechecked our results. This paper has now been cited in more than 500 other papers, a traditional, albeit imperfect, measure of a scientific paper’s impact. By this measure, this paper is one of the biggest successes to come out of my research group.

For our purposes here I am less interested in what came after our paper than what preceded it. To characterize the work that preceded our 2002 paper, I looked at the chain of citations that could be constructed from the references in the paper. Every scientific paper uses references to highlight crucial preceding work, so a chain of references from paper to paper to paper can be constructed leading many decades into the past. I was interested in reconstructing the steps that were vital in preparing my collaborators and me to write our paper, so I focused solely on references to my own earlier work. There are three references of this kind in the 2002 paper, to papers I wrote with my collaborators in 2002, 2000 and 1999. The 2000 paper from this set was based on even earlier papers I had written, including references to a paper from 1999 and two papers from 1997. One of those 1997 papers was directly based on ideas from the very first paper I wrote as a PhD student in 1994. No one would classify some of those earlier papers as being enormous successes. My 1994 paper, for example, has been cited a grand total of 23 times in the “27 years” since it was published. But they all represent work that was vital to me developing the skills and ideas that made the 2002 Physical Review Letters paper possible....