Range - David Epstein Page 0,110
insulin molecules separated according to size in the gel. “Very promising!” his notebook page from that day reads. In subsequent years, “gel electrophoresis” was refined, and revolutionized biology and chemistry. Individual fragments of DNA and components of human blood serum could be separated and studied.
When I spoke with Smithies in 2016, he was ninety years old and in his lab. He was thinking about how the kidney separates large and small molecules. “At the moment, it’s a Saturday morning theoretical experiment,” he said.
What struck me as Smithies spoke was his joy in experimentation. Not just in his lab, but in his life. He embodied a number of tenets I set out to explore in this book. From the outside, he looked like the consummate hyperspecialist. He was a molecular biochemist, after all. Except, molecular biochemist wasn’t really a thing when Smithies was in training. First he studied medicine, until he attended a talk by a professor who was combining chemistry and biology. “He lectured about this new subject which hadn’t yet been invented, in a sense,” Smithies told me. “It was marvelous, and I thought, ‘I’d like to do that. I’d better learn some chemistry.’” He turned on a dime and switched to studying chemistry. He never even thought to feel behind. On the contrary, “that was really very valuable, because at the end I had a good background in biology and wasn’t frightened of biology, and then I wasn’t frightened of chemistry. That gave me a great deal of power in the early days of molecular biology.” What sounds like hyperspecialization today was actually a bold hybrid at the time.
Smithies was a professor at the University of North Carolina when we spoke. He passed away nine months later, at ninety-one. To the end of his life, he encouraged students to think laterally, broaden their experience, and forge their own path in search of match quality. “I try to teach people, ‘Don’t end up a clone of your thesis adviser,’” he told me. “Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills.”
Smithies lived the advice he gave. In his fifties, he took a sabbatical in order to venture a mere two floors away in the same building to learn how to work with DNA. He never did find a precursor to insulin, and by the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007, it was as a geneticist, for figuring out how to modify disease-causing genes so that they could be studied in animals. In that regard, he was a late specializer. I told Smithies that I had recently talked with the provost of a large research university who was using data analytics to assess contributions and make hires and promotions. The provost told me that chemists reliably fall off a cliff twenty years after they get their PhDs. Smithies laughed. “Yeah, well, my most important paper was published when I was about sixty,” he said. A 2016 analysis of ten thousand researchers’ careers determined that there is no standard relationship between experience and contribution; an individual’s most impactful paper was as likely to be their first as their second, their tenth, or their last. (Researchers did tend to publish more frequently at younger ages, though.)
When I mentioned to Smithies that his starched-shirts memory was an example of lateral thinking with withered technology, he added that in 1990 he shared the Gairdner Award (a sort of pre-Nobel) with Edwin Southern, who also wielded a childhood memory that, on its face, seemed totally unrelated. “His was a memory of cyclostyling,” Smithies said, referring to an old document-copying device that used glazed paper and a stencil system. With that in mind, Southern created the “Southern blot,” a ubiquitous method for detecting specific DNA molecules. Gunpei Yokoi would have been delighted. And yet those were nothing compared to the withered technology employed by Tu Youyou, who in 2015 became the first (and so far only) Chinese national to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the first Chinese woman in any category.
Tu is known as the “professor of the three no’s”: no membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, no research experience outside of China, and no postgraduate degree. Before Tu, other scientists had reportedly tested 240,000 compounds searching for a malaria cure. Tu was interested in both modern medicine and history, and was inspired by