Letters to a Young Scientist

by Edward O. Wilson

  How hard will this be? I’ll pull no punches about that part. At Harvard I advised mostly graduate students who planned for academic careers. They chose to combine research with teaching in a research university or liberal arts college. I posited the following time for success in this combination: at the start, forty hours a week for teaching and administration; up to ten hours for continued study in your specialty and related fields; and at least ten hours in research—presumably in the same field as your Ph.D. or postdoctoral work, or close enough to draw on the experience from your student years. Sixty hours a week total can be daunting, I know. So seize every opportunity to take sabbaticals and other paid leaves that allow you stretches of full-time research. Avoid department-level administration beyond thesis committee chairmanships if at all fair and possible. Make excuses, dodge, plead, trade. Spend extra time with students who show talent and interest in your field of research, then employ them as assistants for your benefit and theirs. Take weekends off for rest and diversion, but no vacations. Real scientists do not take vacations. They take field trips or temporary research fellowships in other institutions. Consider carefully job offers from other universities or research institutions that include more research time and fewer teaching and administrative responsibilities.

  Don’t feel guilty about following this advice. University faculties consist of both “inside professors,” who enjoy work that involves close social interactions with other faculty members and take justifiable pride in their service to the institution, and “outside professors,” whose social interactions are primarily with fellow researchers. Outside professors are light on committee work but earn their keep another way: they bring in a flow of new ideas and talent and they add prestige and income proportionate to the amount and quality of their discoveries.

  Wherever your research career takes you, whether into academia or otherwise, stay restless. If you are in an institution that encourages original research and rewards you for it, stay there. But continue to move about intellectually in search of new problems and new opportunities. Granted that happiness awaits those who can find pleasure while working on the same subject all their careers, and they assuredly have a good chance of making breakthrough advances while doing so. Polymer chemistry, computer programs of biological processes, butterflies of the Amazon, galactic maps, and Neolithic sites in Turkey are the kinds of subjects worthy of a lifetime of devotion. Once deeply engaged, a steady stream of small discoveries is guaranteed. But stay alert for the main chance that lies to the side. There will always be the possibility of a major strike, some wholly unexpected find, some little detail that catches your peripheral attention that might very well, if followed, enlarge or even transform the subject you have chosen. If you sense such a possibility, seize it. In science, gold fever is a good thing.

  To make such success more likely, there is another quality in which you might or might not be well endowed but if not should at least try to cultivate. It is entrepreneurship, the willingness to try something daunting you’ve imagined doing and no one else has thought or dared. It could be, for example, starting a project in a part of the world neither you nor your colleagues have yet visited; or finding a way to try an already available instrument or technique not yet used in your field; or, even more bravely, applying your knowledge to another discipline not yet exposed to it.

  Entrepreneurship is enhanced by performing lots of quick, easily performed experiments. Yes, that’s what I just said: experiments quick and easily performed. I know that the popular image of science is one of uncompromising precision, with each step carefully recorded in a notebook, along with periodic statistical tests on data made at regular intervals. Such is indeed absolutely necessary when the experiment is very expensive or time-consuming. It is equally demanded when a preliminary result is to be replicated and confirmed by you and others in order to bring a study to conclusion. But otherwise it is certainly all right and potentially very productive just to mess around. Quick uncontrolled experiments are very productive. They are performed just to see if you can make something interesting happen. Disturb Nature and see if she reveals a secret. To show you my own devotion to the quick and sloppy, I’ll give you several examples from my own initially crude efforts. These are from memory; I didn’t keep notes, careful or otherwise.

  • I put a powerful magnet over a column of running ants to see if I could turn their direction or at least disrupt them, and hence detect whether ants have a magnetic sense. Time consumed: two hours. Result: failed. The ants couldn’t care less.

  • I sealed off the metapleural glands of ants in a laboratory colony. These tiny organs are clusters of cells found on each side of the middle part of the body. I then let the operated ants run over the screened roof of a culture of soil bacteria, and also over other cultures with ants not so treated, in order to see if the metapleural glands shed airborne antibiotic substances. Time consumed: two weeks. Result: failed. (I should have continued the effort, becoming more persistent and using different methods. The substances are there, as subsequent researchers showed.)

  • I tried to create mixed colonies of two species of fire ants by chilling them and switching their queens. Time consumed: two hours. Result: success! I used the method to prove (with careful experiments and neat notes this time) that the traits distinguishing the two species are due to different genes. Chilling and mixing is now a standard technique for several lines of research.

  • In the 1950s, it was thought that ants probably communicate with chemical signals (later called pheromones). But the possibility was still open that they use instead coded tappings and strokings with their antennae. A drumbeat of antennae on the body of a nestmate, for example, might be an alarm signal. I decided to see if I could locate the gland that produces odor trails. If successful, I thought, that could be the first step in working out the ant pheromone code. I dissected out all the main organs in the abdomen of worker fire ants and laid artificial trails made from them, patiently slicing and picking under the microscope with the finest surgical forceps. Time consumed: one week. Result: there was no response to any of the first organs tried, but then to my surprise came a powerful response to the Dufour’s gland, an almost invisible finger-shaped organ located at the base of the sting. A major success this time. Not only did the fire ants follow the trail, they rushed out of the nest to get onto and follow it. The Dufour’s secretions, it seemed, are both guides and stimulants: this was a new concept in pheromone studies. Other scientists and I went on during the following years to work out the dozen or so pheromone signals that compose most of the ant vocabulary.

  Performing small, informal experiments is an exciting sport, and the risk in lost time is small. However, if a preliminary procedure proves necessarily time-consuming or expensive or both, the cost in time and money can become quickly prohibitive. If the effort fails, entrepreneurship requires the character and the means to start over—just as it does in business and other careers outside of science.

  I will close this letter with one further piece of relevant practical advice to offer you if you are already a graduate student or young professional. Unless your training and research commit you to a major research facility, for example a supercollider, space telescope, or stem-cell laboratory, do not linger too long with any one technology. When a new instrument is at the cutting edge, it may open new horizons of research quickly, but it is also at first usually expensive and difficult to operate. As a result, there will be a temptation for a young scientist to build a career in the new technology itself rather than to make original studies that can be performed with it. In biochemistry and cell biology, for example, the centrifuge has long been essential for spinning apart different kinds of molecules and by this means making them available for physical and chemical analysis. In this way the trees can be separated from the forest, so to speak, and by this means can make the whole forest more understandable. At the beginning, centrifuges required a room of their own and a trained technician to manage them. As the
ir engineering was streamlined, however, any researcher could, with a few instructions, run the machines alone. Then centrifuges came out of their personal laboratories in the form of smaller, less expensive units. Today, graduate students in many fields of biology accept them as a routine part of their tabletop armamentarium. The same progression, from technology worthy of a discipline of its own to a routine part of every well-equipped laboratory, also occurred in the evolution of scanning electron microscopy, electrophoresis, computers, DNA sequencing, and inferential statistics software.

  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.

  Seven

  MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

  HOW 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.

  Eight

  I NEVER CHANGED

  APPROACHING 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 sta
rting. 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.