Range - David Epstein Page 0,77

life-altering medical intervention for a professional athlete. “You pretty much saved me from having to go to the hospital!” Priscilla told Jill when she called her.

Even Garg was startled by what Jill had done. They were the most extreme cases of muscle development he had ever seen in lipodystrophy patients—on opposite ends of the spectrum, of course. Jill and Priscilla would never have ended up in the same doctor’s office under normal circumstances. “I can understand a patient can learn more about their disease,” Garg told me. “But to reach out to someone else, and figure out their problem also. It is a remarkable feat.”

Jill did not stop there. She came across the work of a French biologist, Etienne Lefai, a hyperspecialist who studies a protein called SREBP1, which helps cells determine whether to use fat from a meal right away or store it for fuel later. Lefai showed that when the protein builds up in animals, it can cause either extreme muscle atrophy or extreme muscle growth. Jill contacted him out of the blue and suggested that he may have uncovered the actual biological mechanism that makes her and Priscilla so different, SREBP1 interacting with lamin.

“Okay, that triggers a kind of reflection from my side saying, ‘That’s a really good question. That’s a really, really good question!’” Lefai told me in a thick French accent. He has begun investigating whether a lamin gene mutation can alter the regulation of SREBP1, and in turn cause a simultaneous loss of muscle and fat. “I had no idea of what I can do with genetic diseases before she contacted me,” he said. “Now, I have changed the path of my team.”

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The more information specialists create, the more opportunity exists for curious dilettantes to contribute by merging strands of widely available but disparate information—undiscovered public knowledge, as Don Swanson called it. The larger and more easily accessible the library of human knowledge, the more chances for inquisitive patrons to make connections at the cutting edge. An operation like InnoCentive, which at first blush seems totally counterintuitive, should become even more fruitful as specialization accelerates.

It isn’t just the increase in new knowledge that generates opportunities for nonspecialists, though. In a race to the forefront, a lot of useful knowledge is simply left behind to molder. That presents another kind of opportunity for those who want to create and invent but who cannot or simply do not want to work at the cutting edge. They can push forward by looking back; they can excavate old knowledge but wield it in a new way.

CHAPTER 9

Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

DURING TWO CENTURIES of closed-borders isolation, Japan banned hanafuda—“flower cards,” so called because the twelve different suits are represented by flowers. The playing cards were associated with gambling and unwanted Western cultural influence. By the late nineteenth century, Japan was reintroducing itself to the world, and the ban was finally lifted. So it was in the fall of 1889 that a young man opened a tiny wooden shop in Kyoto and hung a sign in the window: “Nintendo.”

The precise meaning of the Japanese characters is lost to history. They may have meant “leave luck to heaven,” but were more likely a poetic way to say “the company that is allowed to sell hanafuda.” By 1950, there were a hundred workers, and the founder’s twenty-two-year-old great-grandson took over. But trouble was coming. As the 1964 Tokyo Olympics approached, Japanese adults were turning to pachinko for gambling, and a bowling craze swallowed entertainment dollars. In a desperate attempt to diversify a company that had survived on hanafuda for three-quarters of a century, the young president began scattershot investing. Food would never go out of fashion, so he shifted the company to instant rice and meals branded with cartoon characters. (Popeye noodle soup, anyone?) Then there was the failed taxi fleet venture, and the failed rent-by-the-hour “love hotels,” which landed the president in the gossip pages. Nintendo sunk into debt. The president resolved to hire top young university graduates to help him innovate.

That was a nonstarter. Nintendo was a small operation in Kyoto; coveted Japanese students wanted big Tokyo companies. On the bright side, there was still the playing card business, which had become more cost-effective with machine-made cards. In 1965, the president settled for hiring a young local electronics graduate named Gunpei Yokoi, who had struggled through his degree and applied to major electronics manufacturers but gotten no offers. “What will you do at Nintendo?” Yokoi’s