Letters to a Young Scientist

by Edward O. Wilson

One reason could be that IQ-geniuses have it too easy in their early training. They don’t have to sweat the science courses they take in college. They find little reward in the necessarily tedious chores of data-gathering and analysis. They choose not to take the hard roads to the frontier, over which the rest of us, the lesser intellectual toilers, must travel.

Early failures and struggle provide ample material for confidence earned.

To reach and stay at the frontier, a strong work ethic is absolutely essential. There must be an ability to pass long hours in study and research with pleasure even though some of the effort will inevitably lead to dead ends. Such is the price of admission to the first rank of research scientists.

How long should you keep at it? As long as it gives you personal fulfillment. In time you will acquire world-class expertise and with certainty make discoveries. Maybe big ones. If you are at all like me (and almost all the scientists I know are, in this regard), you will find friends among your fellow enthusiasts and experts. Daily satisfaction from what you are doing will be one of your rewards, but of equal importance is the esteem of people you respect. Yet another is the recognition that what you find will uniquely benefit humanity.

To make such success more likely, there is another quality in which you might or might not be well endowed but if not should at least try to cultivate. It is entrepreneurship, the willingness to try something daunting you’ve imagined doing and no one else has thought or dared. It could be, for example, starting a project in a part of the world neither you nor your colleagues have yet visited; or finding a way to try an already available instrument or technique not yet used in your field; or, even more bravely, applying your knowledge to another discipline not yet exposed to it.

Entrepreneurship is enhanced by performing lots of quick, easily performed experiments. Yes, that’s what I just said: experiments quick and easily performed.

it is certainly all right and potentially very productive just to mess around. Quick uncontrolled experiments are very productive. They are performed just to see if you can make something interesting happen. Disturb Nature and see if she reveals a secret.

Performing small, informal experiments is an exciting sport, and the risk in lost time is small. However, if a preliminary procedure proves necessarily time-consuming or expensive or both, the cost in time and money can become quickly prohibitive. If the effort fails, entrepreneurship requires the character and the means to start over—just as it does in business and other careers outside of science.

Ingenuity is required

Unless your training and research commit you to a major research facility, for example a supercollider, space telescope, or stem-cell laboratory, do not linger too long with any one technology. When a new instrument is at the cutting edge, it may open new horizons of research quickly, but it is also at first usually expensive and difficult to operate. As a result, there will be a temptation for a young scientist to build a career in the new technology itself rather than to make original studies that can be performed with it.

The principle I have drawn from this history is the following: use but don’t love technology. If you need it but find it at all forbiddingly difficult, recruit a better-prepared collaborator. Put the project first and, by any available and honorable means, complete and publish the results.

False modesty is the peccadillo of the scientific memoirist. An example (imaginary) might read as follows: “While working at the Whitehead Institute X-ray crystallography laboratory on avian muscle protein, I became fascinated with the classical problem of autonomous folding. I was led to consider . . .” Well, I’m sure that such writers in real life were fascinated and even compelled to consider this or that, but not me reading their account. A reader would like to know the reason why they did the hard work to achieve their goal. Where was the adventure, what was the dream?

But is groupthink the best way to create really new science? Risking heresy, I hereby dissent. I believe the creative process usually unfolds in a very different way. It arises and for a while germinates in a solitary brain. It commences as an idea and, equally important, the ambition of a single person who is prepared and strongly motivated to make discoveries in one domain of science or another. The successful innovator is favored by a fortunate combination of talent and circumstance, and is socially conditioned by family, friends, teachers, and mentors, and by stories of great scientists and their discoveries.

He (or she) is sometimes driven, I will dare to suggest, by a passive-aggressive nature, and sometimes an anger against some part of society or problem in the world.

There is also an introversion in the innovator that keeps him from team sports and social events. He dislikes authority, or at least being told what to do. He is not a leader in high school or col...

From an early age he is a dreamer, not a doer. His attention wanders easily. He likes to probe, to collect, to tinker. He is prone to fantasize. He is not inclined to focus. He will not...

When prepared by education to conduct research, the most innovative scientists of my experience do so eagerly and with no prompting. They prefer to take first steps alone. They seek a problem to be solved, an important phenomenon previously overlooked, a cause-and-effect connecti...

An innovator may add a mathematician or statistician, a computer expert, a natural-products chemist, one or several laboratory or field assistants, a colleague or two in the same specialty—whoever it takes for the project to succeed becomes a collaborator. The collaborator is often another innovator who has been toying with the same idea, and is prone to modify or add to it.

The project moves forward until an original result is achieved. Group thought has brought it to fruition.

Innovator, creative collaborator, or facilitator: in the course of your successful career, you may well fill each of these roles at one time or another.

I’d like you to think, as I thought early in my career of older scientists, “If he could do it, so can I, and maybe better.”

Nothing complicated about collecting and studying insects. For a while anyway, they served as my lions and tigers, not exactly big game snared in nets by a hundred native assistants, but nevertheless the real thing. Thus fired up, I put some bottles in a cloth bag and walked over to the nearby woods of Rock Creek Park on my first expedition, venturing into second-growth deciduous woodland crisscrossed by paths. I remember vividly the animals I brought home that day. They included a wolf spider and the red and green nymph of a long-horned grasshopper. Subsequently I decided to add butterflies as my quarry.

My future was set. Ellis and I agreed we were going to be entomologists when we grew up. We delved into college-level textbooks, which we could scarcely read, although we tried very hard. One that we checked out from a public library and worked on page by page was Robert E. Snodgrass’s formidable Principles of Insect Morphology, published in 1935. Only later did I learn that grown-up biologists were using it as a technical reference book.

Returning in 1940 with my family to Mobile, I plunged into the rich new fauna of butterflies.

Then I turned to ants, monomaniacally determined to find every kind living in the weed-grown vacant lot next to our large family house on Charleston Street.

I’ve gone into this boyhood story to make a point that may be relevant to your own career trajectory. I have never changed.

AS A CALLOW, severely undereducated eighteen-year-old student at the University of Alabama, I began a correspondence with a Ph.D. student at Harvard University named William L. Brown. Although only seven years my senior, Bill was already a leading world authority on ants.

“Wilson,” he wrote his teenage follower, “you’ve made a good start with your project of identifying all the species of ants found in Alabama. But it’s time to get serious about a more basic subject, where you can do original work in biology. If you’re going to study ants, get serious.” Bill, when I first came to know him, was at that time absorbed in classifying a group of species called the dacetine ants, limited mostly to the tropics and parts of the warm temperate zone.

“Wilson,” Bill went on, “there are a lot of species of dacetines in Alabama. I want you to collect as many colonies for our studies as you can, and while you’re at it, find out something about their behavior. Almost nothing has been done on that subject. We don’t even know what they eat.”

In spite of my young age and lack of experience, he expected me to behave as a professional entomologist. He insisted that I just get out there and get the job done.

I began by molding a series of plaster-of-Paris boxes with cavities the size of those that wild colonies occupy in nature. I added a larger adjacent cavity where the ants could hunt for prey. Into many such cavities I placed live mites, springtails, insect larvae, and a wide variety of other invertebrates I found around the nests of dacetines in natural habitats. I was later to label this the “cafeteria method.”

My efforts were rewarded quickly. The little ants, I discovered, prefer soft-bodied springtails (technically, entomobryoid collembolans). As I watched them stalk and capture these prey, the odd anatomy of the dacetine ants made perfect sense.

From my and Bill Brown’s early studies, various of which we published singly or together, a first picture of dacetine biology emerged. First, physiologists came to realize that the closing of the mandibles is one of the fastest movements that exist in the animal kingdom. Also the spongelike collar around the dacetine’s waist was discovered by later researchers to be the source of a chemical that attracts springtails, drawing them closer to the mandibular snare.

During the next decade, Bill Brown and I took the next logical step into evolutionary biology. Armed with growing information, we reconstructed the changes in dacetines across millions of years, as they spread around the world and their species multiplied.

The history of the dacetine ants came into focus as we continued our studies. It turned out to be an evolutionary epic comparable to that of all the kinds of antelopes, for example, or all of the rodents, or all of the birds of prey. You may think that ants like these, being so small, must also be unimportant and deserving of less attention. Quite the contrary.

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In the Central and South American forests and grasslands alone, one taxonomic group of ants, the leafcutters, collect fragments of leaves and flowers on which they rear fungi for food, making them the leading consumers of vegetation. In the savannas and grasslands of Africa, mound-building termites also rear fungi and are the primary animal builders of the soil.

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If we were to disappear, the rest of life would flourish as a result. If on the other hand the little invertebrates on the land were to disappear, almost everything else would die, including most of humanity.

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I followed by happenstance the advice I gave you earlier: go where the least action is occurring. Just by any small twist of fate, I might easily have joined the large population of young biologists working on mice, birds, and other large animals. Like most of them, I would have enjoyed a productive and happy career in research and teaching. Nothing wrong with that at all, but by following the less conventional path, and by having an inspiring mentor like Bill Brown, I had a far easier time of it.

I discovered early the special opportunity to conduct scientific research in rotting stumps and other microcosms that make up the foundation of the living world, but which then and to this day remain so easily passed by.

You may think of my story of ants as only a narrow slice of science, of interest chiefly to the researchers focused on it. You would be quite right. But it is nonetheless at a different level from an equally impassioned devotion to, say, fly fishing, Civil War battlegrounds, or Roman coins. The findings of its lesser grails are a permanent addition to knowledge of the real world. They can be linked to other bodies of knowledge, and often the resulting networks of understanding lead to major advances in the overall epic of science.

The story of Corrie Saux Moreau’s ambitious undertaking is one I feel especially important to bring to you. It suggests that courage in science born of self-confidence (without arrogance!), a willingness to take a risk but with resilience, a lack of fear of authority, a set of mind that prepares you to take a new direction if thwarted, are of great value—win or lose.

One of my favorite maxims is from Floyd Patterson, the light heavyweight boxer who defeated heavier men to win and for a while hold the heavyweight championship. “You try the impossible to achieve the unusual.”

TO MAKE DISCOVERIES in science, both small and important, you must be an expert on the topics addressed. To be an expert innovator requires commitment. Commitment to a subject implies sustained hard work. If you look beneath the surface of important discoveries to obtain a glimpse of the scientists who made them, you will soon see the truth of this generalization.

I read biographies for examples of this.

During nearly two decades, from 1985 to 2003, I brought to reality a dream that others before me considered inordinately difficult or even impossible. Fitted in between my classes at Harvard in the years before I retired, as well as other research and writing projects, I undertook the classification and natural history of the gigantic ant genus Pheidole.

Ant taxonomists called the genus Pheidole the Mount Everest of ant taxonomy, towering arrogantly in front of us, seemingly too big to be mastered. There were many lesser but still important challenges on which others could build a productive career. I could face failure, I thought, so I took the job of ascending the ant Everest,

In the end, when Pheidole in the New World: A Dominant, Hyperdiverse Ant Genus was published in 2003, the book comprised 798 pages in which 624 species were diagnosed, 334 of them new to science, with everything known of the biology of every species cited, and all of the species illustrated, with a total of over 5,000 drawings I had made myself. Even as copies of Pheidole in the New World were being printed, new species continued to pour into the museum from collaborators in the field.

I had another goal in mind while encompassing the classification of the monster genus. One was to discover new phenomena in the course of giving thought to each species in turn. I was following the second of two strategies I gave you in an earlier letter: for each kind of organism there exists a problem for the solution of which the organism is ideally suited. One success in this correlative effort was the discovery of the “enemy specification” phenomenon.

The principle sounds like common sense. But do species really evolve such an enemy specification response? I had never thought of it much one way or the other. Instead, I discovered it by accident. During the Pheidole project I cultured laboratory colonies of Pheidole dentata, an abundant species through the southern United States.

One day I was conducting one of my easy, quick experiments by placing other kinds of ants and insects next to the artificial nest entrances of the Pheidole dentata colonies just to see how they would respond. I was especially curious to see which ones would draw out the powerful big-headed soldiers.

The response was usually tepid. Either the ants contacting the intruder retreated into the nest or, with a few other nestmates, engaged it in combat. But when I dropped just a single fire ant worker at t...

The first forager to encounter the intruder rushed back into the nest, laying an odor trail as it ran, while frantically contacting one nestmate after the other. Both minor workers and soldiers then poured out of the nest, zigzagging and circling in a search for the fire ant worker. When they found it they attacked it viciously. The minor workers bit and pulled its legs, while the soldiers, employing their sharp mandibles and powerful adduc...

It became apparent that Pheidole survive by building their nests a safe distance from the fire ant colonies and killing off fire ant scouts before they can report home.