Range - David Epstein Page 0,115

a huge number of other scientists, featured ample conventional combinations, but also added an injection of unusual knowledge combinations.

A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers.

To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.

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Casadevall leads by example. A single conversation with him is liable to include Anna Karenina, the Federalist Papers, the fact that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were philosophers as well as scientists, why the Roman Empire wasn’t more innovative, and a point about mentoring in the form of a description of the character Mentor from Homer’s Odyssey. “I work at it,” he said, smirking. “I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”

One of Casadevall’s projects was born from a news article he read about a robot sent into the Chernobyl nuclear accident site, still highly contaminated thirty years post-disaster. The article happened to mention that the robot returned with some black mold, a kind that resembled a grotty shower curtain and that had colonized the abandoned reactor. “So, why black mold?” Casadevall asked rhetorically. “And then one thing led to another.” He and colleagues made a remarkable find—that the mold was nourishing itself with radiation. Not with radioactive substances—with radiation itself.

Casadevall makes sure to highlight experiences outside the lab and how they contributed to who he is today. His family fled Cuba and arrived in Queens when he was eleven. At sixteen, he got his first job, at McDonald’s, and worked there until he was twenty. It’s still on his résumé, and he made sure to discuss it in his Johns Hopkins interview. “It was a great, great experience,” he told me. “I learned a lot working there.” Like handling pressure. His younger brother worked there, too, and was briefly taken hostage during a holdup. “He spent two days on the witness stand where the lawyers made fun of his accent,” Casadevall recalled. “He came out ready for law school. Now he’s a successful trial lawyer.” After McDonald’s, Casadevall worked as a bank teller. (“That was held up too!”) His father wanted him to have something practical to fall back on, so a community college degree in pest control operations hangs on his office wall, near a certificate of his election into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine.

Casadevall is renowned in his area of expertise. He has no trouble getting research grants, and is frequently one of the scientists who helps determine who else gets grants. He is a winner if the specialization status quo continues. And yet he considers his attempt to shatter it the most important work of his life. The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.

Laszlo Polgar, in the midst of his chess experiment with his daughters, proclaimed that “the problems of cancer and AIDS” would more likely be solved if his system of narrow specialization and efficient education were used beyond chess, to educate a thousand kids. Casadevall is a student of innovation history. He grew up as a doctor and scientist when HIV/AIDS exploded into an epidemic, and he could hardly disagree more passionately. “When I went to medical school, I