Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

(Frogs, and the water they contain, are diamagnetic, or repelled by magnetic fields.)

graphene, a material one-hundred thousand times thinner than a

Spiders fed graphene have spun silk many times tougher than the Kevlar in bulletproof vests.

Graphene consists of carbon strips one atom thick, an arrangement previously considered purely theoretical. When Geim and Novoselov

The word “amateur,” she pointed out, did not originate as an insult, but comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular

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 lo...

The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.

In 1984, it’s found to be a retrovirus, HIV. In 1987, you have the first therapy. In 1996, you have such effective therapy that people don’t have to die of it anymore. How did that happen? Was it because companies all of a sudden rushed to make drugs? No. If you really look back and analyze it, before that time society had spent some of its very hard-earned money to study a curiosity called retroviruses. Just a curiosity in animals. So by the time HIV was found to be a retrovirus, you already knew that if you interfered with the protease [a type of enzyme] that you could deactivate it. So when HIV arrived, society had right off the shelf a huge amount of knowledge from investments made in a curiosity that at the time had no use.

Casadevall’s overarching point is that the innovation ecosystem should intentionally preserve range and inefficiency. He is fighting an uphill battle.

“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”

curious phenomenon has appeared in recent years on a near-annual basis when the Nobel Prizes are awarded. Someone who receives one explains that their breakthrough could not have occurred today.

In 2016, Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi closed his Nobel lecture ominously: “Truly original discoveries in science are often triggered by unpredictable and unforeseen small findings. . . . Scientists are increasingly required to provide evidence of immediate and tangible applications of their work.” That is head start fervor come full circle; explorers have to pursue such narrowly spec...

When engineer Bill Gore left DuPont to form the company that invented Gore-Tex, he fashioned it after his observation that companies do their most impactful creative work in a crisis, because the disciplinary boundaries fly out the window. “Communication really happens in the carpool,” he once said. He made sure that “dabble time” was a cultural staple.

the more work eminent creators produced, the more duds they churned out, and the higher their chances of a supernova success.

So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you.

start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.

As Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a century ago, of the free exchange of ideas, “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”