HOW does science make its great leaps forward?
The academic establishment鈥攁nd the funding bodies鈥攚ill tell you
that all the important advances take place through research at universities and
institutes. But then they would say that, wouldn鈥檛 they?
The reality is more surprising. Look at the history of science and you will
see that it progresses mostly through accident or rebellion鈥攐r as a
result of somebody鈥檚 hobby. Innovators often come from fields outside those in
which they make their mark. It seems that a fresh mind, or a viewpoint born of a
free spirit, is best placed to offer revolutionary insights鈥攕omething that
the people who fund science consistently fail to take account.
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There are many examples of successful amateur scientists and inventors.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the microscope pioneer, sold sewing supplies for a
living. Christopher Wren, who helped rebuild London after the great fire of
1666, was a natural scientist who studied architecture as a hobby. John Boyd
Dunlop, father of the pneumatic tyre, was a veterinarian. Laszlo
B铆r贸, who invented the ballpoint pen with his brother Georg, was a
sculptor and journalist.
William Smith drew the first fossil-based geological maps of Britain in 1815
when he was a surveyor. He studied strata while digging canals. The
bacteriophage was named by F茅lix d鈥橦茅relle, who left school
unqualified and spent much of his early life as an outlaw before entering
university for the first time as a professor at Yale. Automatic telephone
dialling, which connects calls without an operator, was developed by Almon
B. Strowger, an undertaker who was losing business to his rival through an
eavesdropper at the telephone exchange. Photocopiers were invented by
Chester Carlson, a patent lawyer who researched his invention at the New York
public library.
Colour photography was developed not by employees of a high-powered research
institute but by Leopold Mannes and Leo Godowsky Jr, two concert musicians who
learned chemistry from books and experimented in their hotel rooms between
performances on stage. Embryo transfer was developed by Walter Heape, a
businessman who eventually wrote a book about his hobby. The polymerase chain
reaction鈥攁 technique key to modern genetics鈥攚as invented by Kary
Mullis, who was working in a restaurant before he was tempted back to the
laboratory.
The pioneers of today鈥檚 computer age, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, were
university dropouts, while Clive Sinclair never went in the first place.
Recording tape was invented in the home workshop of an Austrian engineer named
Fritz Pfleumer. Although the computer hard disc emerged from IBM鈥檚 labs, it was
a bootleg venture undertaken by employees working against official
instructions.
Progress often depends on an experiment going wrong. Float glass, used in
most of the world鈥檚 windows, was the brainchild of Alastair Pilkington (who
worked for Pilkington鈥檚, though was unrelated to that family). His prototype
glass-making apparatus failed to produce anything satisfactory until part of the
machine broke, and the experiment ran without anyone realising something was
wrong. By chance, the process gave rise to glass of the gauge that is most in
demand today.
Polyethylene, one of the most important plastics, was created in 1933 when a
pressure vessel developed a leak. Viagra emerged from a search for drugs to
treat angina. The first drug for baldness, Regaine (also known as Rogane), grew
out of an unforeseen side effect of a treatment for hypertension. John Cade in
Australia stumbled on lithium salts as a treatment for manic depression when he
used them as a carrier for uric acid, which he believed was the active
ingredient. It was only realised later that it was the lithium cation that had
the desired effect.
Rebel science, where practitioners defy the orders of their superiors, is
another source of progress. It was the independent research of Roger Altounyan
that led to the 鈥渟pinhaler鈥�, a device for delivering powdered medication to
asthma sufferers. Defying official instructions, he compressed decades of
research into months by experimenting on himself.
James Watson and Francis Crick defied departmental policy when they took
Rosalind Franklin鈥檚 diffraction evidence for the helical structure of DNA and
made it into the model we know so well.
Members of today鈥檚 research funding bodies may be startled to learn that most
of these discoveries were made with very modest investment. The crowning example
is Einstein鈥檚 theory of relativity, which resulted from work in his spare time
while he was a patents clerk in Zurich. The greatest scientific theory of the
century cost the price of a notebook.
These are not fringe case histories, but developments of central
significance. It is not academia that fosters discovery, but personal
enthusiasm. Current policies and funding strategies ignore individuals,
perpetuating the belief that it is the team that matters. Nobody doubts that a
well-managed team is best placed to turn ideas into marketable products. But the
idea itself matters above all鈥攁nd that is the province of the gifted
individual.
Independent innovators often work alongside an academic establishment that
can then profit from their discoveries. Sometimes they are actively courted by
academia. But the narrow view and conformity of a university environment have
rarely suited gifted innovators. The vogue for exaggerating progress in the hope
of securing another short-term grant makes many universities an uncomfortable
environment for a free spirit.
There are few sources of funding for amateur or independent scientists. The
Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation offers sizeable grants to individual
geniuses. But the British National Endowment for Science (now known as NESTA)
has widened its scope and also gives money to the arts. Perhaps it feels there
are too few individuals in science worth supporting. Yet it would not be too
difficult to award grants to practitioners with solid track records who are
working outside the system.
It is time to give individual scientists their due. The future will owe much
to their creativity.