Read Online Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson - Free Book Online

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