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

Pasteur said in 1854, “Fortune favors only the prepared mind.” Since he wrote this, the roads to the frontier have greatly lengthened, and there is an enormously larger population of scientists who travel to get there. There is a compensation for you in your journey, however. The frontier is also vastly wider now, and it grows more so constantly. Long stretches along it remain sparsely populated, in every discipline, from physics to anthropology, and somewhere in these vast unexplored regions you should settle.
    But, you may well ask, isn’t the cutting edge a place only for geniuses? No, fortunately. Work accomplished on the frontier defines genius, not just getting there. In fact, both accomplishments along the frontier and the final eureka moment are achieved more by entrepreneurship and hard work than by native intelligence. This is so much the case that in most fields most of the time, extreme brightness may be a detriment. It has occurred to me, after meeting so many successful researchers in so many disciplines, that the ideal scientist is smart only to an intermediate degree: bright enough to see what can be done but not so bright as to become bored doing it. Two of the most original and influential Nobel Prize winners for whom I have such information, one a molecular biologist and the other a theoretical physicist, scored IQs in the low 120s at the start of their careers. (I personally made do with an underwhelming 123.) Darwin is thought to have had an IQ of about 130.
    What, then, of certified geniuses whose IQs exceed 140, and are as high as 180 or more? Aren’t they the ones who produce the new groundbreaking ideas? I’m sure some do very well in science, but let me suggest that perhaps, instead, many of the IQ-brightest join societies like MENSA and work as auditors and tax consultants. Why should the rule of optimum medium brightness hold? (And I admit this perception of mine is only speculative.) One reason could be that IQ-geniuses have it too easy in their early training. They don’t have to sweat the science courses they take in college. They find little reward in the necessarily tedious chores of data-gathering and analysis. They choose not to take the hard roads to the frontier, over which the rest of us, the lesser intellectual toilers, must travel.
    Being bright, then, is just not enough for those who dream of success in scientific research. Mathematical fluency is not enough. To reach and stay at the frontier, a strong work ethic is absolutely essential. There must be an ability to pass long hours in study and research with pleasure even though some of the effort will inevitably lead to dead ends. Such is the price of admission to the first rank of research scientists.
    They are like treasure hunters of older times in an uncharted land, these elite men and women. If you choose to join them, the adventure is the quest, and discoveries are your silver and gold. How long should you keep at it? As long as it gives you personal fulfillment. In time you will acquire world-class expertise and with certainty make discoveries. Maybe big ones. If you are at all like me (and almost all the scientists I know are, in this regard), you will find friends among your fellow enthusiasts and experts. Daily satisfaction from what you are doing will be one of your rewards, but of equal importance is the esteem of people you respect. Yet another is the recognition that what you find will uniquely benefit humanity. That alone is enough to kindle creativity, though it cannot alone sustain it.
    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