Range - David Epstein Page 0,112

the week’s standard practice with wide-roaming exploration. They embrace what Max Delbrück, a Nobel laureate who studied the intersection of physics and biology, called “the principle of limited sloppiness.” Be careful not to be too careful, Delbrück warned, or you will unconsciously limit your exploration.

Novoselov was Geim’s PhD student, taken on board after Geim’s colleague told him that Novoselov “seems to be wasting his life” in another lab. When Novoselov arrived, he found equipment that was similar to that in his previous lab, but “this flexibility and the opportunity to try yourself in different areas which was interesting.” A Science profile of him bore the section titles “Going for Breadth” and “Spread Thin,” which would sound really bad and like he was falling behind if the article wasn’t also about how at thirty-six he was the youngest physics Nobel laureate in forty years.

Like Van Gogh or Frances Hesselbein or hordes of young athletes, Novoselov probably looked from the outside like he was behind, until all of a sudden he very much wasn’t. He was lucky. He arrived in a workspace that treated mental meandering as a competitive advantage, not a pest to be exterminated in the name of efficiency.

That kind of protection from the cult of the head start is increasingly rare. At some point or other, we all specialize to one degree or another, so the rush to get there can seem logical. Fortunately, there are pioneers who are working to balance the cult of the head start. They want to have it all—the mental meandering along with the wisdom of deep experience; the broad conceptual skills that make use of Flynn’s scientific spectacles even within training programs for specialists; and the creative power of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. They want to reverse the Tiger trend, not just for themselves, but for everyone, and even in domains synonymous with hyperspecialization. The future of discovery, they argue, depends on it.

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It only takes a few minutes of conversation to gather that Arturo Casadevall is a beaker-half-full kind of guy. One of the greatest days of his life was when gravitational waves were detected, and that’s not his field. “Two black holes collide in space a billion years ago, and for a billion years those gravity waves travel through space-time,” he narrated, eyes widening. “When the original signal began, life on Earth was unicellular, and in that time humanity manages to build two interferometers and measure it. I mean, what an accomplishment that is.” He is also an MD-PhD and a star in his own domains, microbiology and immunology. He has studied AIDS and anthrax, and has illuminated important aspects of how fungal diseases work. His “h-index,” a measure of a scientist’s productivity and how often they are cited, recently surpassed Albert Einstein’s.* So his peers took it seriously when he arrived at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2015, as chair of molecular microbiology and immunology, and warned that scientific research is in crisis.

In a lecture to his new colleagues, Casadevall declared that the pace of progress had slowed, while the rate of retractions in scientific literature had accelerated, proportionally outpacing the publication of new studies. “If this continues unabated,” he said, “the entire literature will be retracted in a few years.” It was science gallows humor, but grounded in data. Part of the problem, he argued, is that young scientists are rushed to specialize before they learn how to think; they end up unable to produce good work themselves and unequipped to spot bad (or fraudulent) work by their colleagues.

The reason Casadevall came to Hopkins, from a comfy post at New York City’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is that the new gig offered him the chance to create a prototype of what he thinks graduate science education, and eventually all education, should be.

Counter to the prevailing trend, Casadevall—with Gundula Bosch, a professor of both biology and education—is despecializing training, even for students who plan to become the most specialized of specialists. The program, known as the R3 Initiative (Rigor, Responsibility, Reproducibility), starts with interdisciplinary classes that include philosophy, history, logic, ethics, statistics, communication, and leadership. A course titled “How Do We Know What Is True?” examines types of evidence through history and across disciplines. In “Anatomy of Scientific Error,” students are detectives, hunting for signs of misconduct or poor methods in real research, while also learning how errors and serendipity have led to momentous discoveries.

When Casadevall described his vision of broad education on a