Chase, Chance, and Creativity
Every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery-a bolt from the blue as it were-you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance.
Lord Rutherford
Chase, Chance, and Creativity
The Lucky Art of Novelty
James H. Austin
To my parents and teachers who set the example, to friends and co-workers who helped at all stages, and to my wife, Judith, who made the rest possible.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface to the MIT Press Edition xi
Preface xiii
By Way of Introduction xvii
'art I The Meandering Chase 1
1 Of Nerves and Neurologists; Boston, 1950 3
2 Enlarged Nerves; Oakland, 1951 6
3 Metachromasia; New York City, 1953 8
4 Microscopic Studies; New York City, 1953 10
5 Sulfated Lipids; Portland, Oregon, 1955 15
6 Molecules and Wanderings, 1957 24
7 Controls and the Experimental Globoid Response, 1960 30
8 Enzymes and India, 1961, 1962-1963 36
9 Flashback; The Chase, 1942 42
10 Toni and Lafora Bodies, 1965 43
11 Finger Prints on the Window; Filling in the Hole 49
12 Overview: What Next? So What? 51
Part II The Varieties of Chance 59
13 Chance and the Creative Adventure 61
14 On the Trail of Serendipity 63
15 The Kettering, Pasteur, and Disraeli Principles 70
16 Personal Encounters with Chance I-IV 77
17 The Spanish Connection 80
18 Altanurage 84
19 The Fleming Effect: Examples of Chance in Biology and Medicine 86
20 Never on Monday; The Unhappy Accidents 91
Part III The Roots of Creativity 97
21 Some Dimensions of Creativity 99
22 The Creative Personality: Pro 104
23 The Creative Personality: I'ro and Con 112
24 Motivations Underlying Creativity 118
25 Flashback: Life with Father, 1941 126
26 The Search for Novel Stimuli 129
27 Right Brain/Left Brain; One Brain 136
28 The Quest; The Quests 144
29 The Creative Setting 147
3o The Creative Prelude 159
31 Moments of Creative Inspiration 164
32 Follow Through; A More Personal View 168
33 All Quiet on the Eastern Front? 173
34 Prescription for Creativity 185
35 Summary 189
36 In Closing 190
Suggested Further Reading 193
Appendixes
A Condensed Plot of The Three Princes of Serendip 195
B Examples of Chance III and IV in Biology and Medicine 200
C Life in a Laboratory Examined 202
Glossary 205
Cast of Characters 211
Permissions 217
Notes 221
Index 239
List of Illustrations
Figure 1. A normal nerve fiber and the way it is affected in hypertrophic neuritis 5
Figure 2. The normal myelin sheath and three of its molecules 17
Figure 3. MLD; the granular body and its chemical background 22
Figure 4. A normal nerve fiber and the way it is affected in metachromatic leukodystrophy 23
Figure 5. Sequences in the metachromatic leukodystrophy story 23
Figure 6. GLD; the globoid body and its chemical background 33
Figure 7. Evolution of the sulfatase research 40
Figure 8. The Lafora body and its chemical background 45
Figure 9. Evolution of the research in Lafora's myoclonus epilepsy 48
Figure 10. Evolution of the studies starting with hypertrophic neuritis 52
Figure 11. Outline of the history of SERENDIPITY 65
Figure 12. Opposing traits in creativity 115
Figure 13. International contributions to MLD research 152
Table 1. Various aspects and kinds of good luck 76
Preface to the MIT Press Edition
This edition appears a quarter of a century after the first. Most of the original remains untouched; I've updated only certain parts. The original intent remains: to provide a brief, personal story of the ways persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research.
During these past twenty-five years, the literature on creativity has exploded. In 1988, a new Creativity Research Journal was founded. Readers who might wish to review the topic of creativity as a whole now have available a two-volume encyclopedia published in 1999.'
For my taste, most of the academic literature on creativity remains too formal and one-dimensional to convey the intimate flavor of biomedical research. For example, though the Eiicyclopedia summarizes topics from A ("acting") to Z ("Zen"), its index cites only three listings for chance. Its readers will find no in-depth analysis of the typology of chance, and no system of organizing principles that links its varieties with prescient statements by such notable figures as Kettering, Pasteur, and Disraeli. Nor will they find emphasized specific examples of how the four varieties interact, either in the kinds of ordinary "happenings" in which this minor author participated or in the major memorable scientific discoveries of recent centuries.
Does luck enter into creativity? Lately, no one in my field, and relatively few outside it--' seem inclined to examine or weigh its influence. In fact, I was led originally to write part II of this book because the operations of two simple-minded axioms appeared to have been overlooked. The first is that many of the most novel discoveries tend to occur when the life path of one particular person happens to intersect the trajectories of several varieties of chance. Underlying so elementary a notion are several subtle factors that converge accidentally.
How do they happen to come together fortuitously? This becomes more apparent when we look deeply into the story behind the familiar story of Alexander Fleming and the penicillin mold. "The Fleming Effect" suggested itself as a phrase that might help us recall that such fourfold closures can, and do occur.
The second simple-minded axiom follows from the first: the more diversity among these individual varieties of chance, the more unique is the creative product when their lines intersect.
Luck comes in degrees. So does novelty, the hallmark of the creative process, and the yardstick by which its product is measured. A key agency of this novelty is intuition, a process reaching far beyond ordinary logic. Few firm facts clarify the mechanisms of intuition, but speculations keep multiplying. Someday, a multidimensional study of intuition-one that includes advanced techniques of brain neuroimaging-may shed much more light on its physiological origins. Beyond such needed research lies a still more daunting task: to understand the psychophysiological origins of our most profound forms of insight. These are the extraordinary realizations that plumb existential forms of wisdom, the kinds that unveil "the way all things really are.,,
I wasn't ready to appreciate the nature of such "awakenings" until long after I ventured into Zen. Buddhism reserves the technical term, prajna, for the awesome flash of these refinements of insight. Prajna operates at our deeper levels of precognitive processing. It unveils instantly, with utmost clarity, our most profound, comprehensive forms of existential understanding. These "peak" moments have remarkable creative potentials. They can transform not just one's momentary state of consciousness, but one's subsequent attitudes and behavior as well. Our neurosciences are barel
y starting to glimpse the dimensions of these age-old processes of creative transformation."
James H. Austin M.D.
Moscow, Idaho
September, 2002
Preface
What scientists do has never been the subject of a scientific, that is, an ethological* inquiry. It is no use looking to scientific 'papers', for they not merely conceal but actively misrepresent the reasoning that goes into the work they describe.
Peter Medawar
This is a story of the ways persistence, chance, and creativity interact in medical research. My thesis is that novelty in research is like that in any endeavor-it springs from the dynamic interplay among several ingredients: personal life style, people, luck, intuition, and system.
The idea for the book evolved when I was invited to deliver the first Saul Korey Lecture at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Thinking over what I might say, it occurred to me that here was a unique opportunity. This time I could depart from the traditional formal scientific lecture and do what I had really wanted to do for years; trace the roots of our medical research back to their very beginnings. Finally, I could "tell it like it really was," stress the interactions with other persons and emphasize the elements of chance, for these two factors often determined not only the direction of our research but also its success or failure.
To write such an "inside" story, the first part of the book had to take the form of a personal narrative. Neurologists in particular, and scientific investigators in general, rarely write this personal a statement of their thoughts and actions. Perhaps the real reason is that there is no survival value in using the pronoun, "I," and even remotely appearing smug, self-seeking, and pretentious. After all, why risk the immodesty of writing about yourself if you're not Alexander Fleming, and if penicillin, DNA, or the Nobel Prize are not involved? Too high a price is exacted by the scientific community for any display of ego.
Several reasons dictated my going ahead this way despite the personal cost. The first is that I have always been deeply interested in the mechanisms by which things happen. Experience tells me that research is a series of contingencies, of zigzags, joined by one fragile link after another. You would never realize this from reading the tidy, aseptic research accounts that fill our libraries. For balance, someone should present a different side of the picture-show some contemporary research in all its haphazard, unpredictable complexity. This book aims to do so.
A second reason for going ahead is to help clear up serious recurrent misconceptions about medical research among many laymen and their elected representatives. The illusions: crash programs with "big" money will "buy" big results; all research can be "directed" on a contract basis toward specified "targets"; exploration is justified only insofar as it brings practical results at predictable times. It is crucial to dispel these misunderstandings, because many grants for research have been increasingly slashed since 1967 (the year of the high-water mark in federal support for research). All the more reason then, to encourage benefactors in government agencies and foundations to permit their investigators enough independence so that they may be free to follow their creative instincts most fruitfully.
We are all creative, but often only to the extent that we are lucky. What determines luck is the subject of the second part of this book. It turns out that there are more kinds of chance than we realize, and chance involves more than that poorly understood term, serendipity. All these aspects are developed both in the essays of part II and in the Appendix.
Why is creativity important? The answer is simple: novelty is what creativity, research, and much of the zest in life are all about. It is curious how relatively little we know about the creative process and how it operates. Misunderstandings about creativity by administrators are legendary, but it is also surprising to find how many investigators themselves are unaware of recent evidence that suggests the ways their own brain functions when it creates new ideas. The third part of this book therefore attempts to remedy this situation. It includes a series of essays on those psychological and physiological aspects of the creative process the significance of which transcends creativity in science. Creativity is multifactorial, and some of its factors can be consciously encouraged. It is therefore a practical subject, full of benefits for those who know something about it. To humans, then, creativity is much more important a subject than, say, ornithology is to the birds. Parents, teachers, businessmen-anyone concerned with fostering novelty in themselves or others-may find something of profit here. A prescription for creativity ends this section.
A glossary will help you understand the technical terminology, but some disclaimers are in order, for many other things are not in this small book. You will be spared my more planned, rational experiments, and those that failed because they were poorly conceived, stupidly executed, or soundly defeated by circumstances. I will emphasize the strength the creative process gains through its depth and its diversity, rather than attempt to codify it. True, I will pull things together in the summary and in a prescription, but you won't be pressed into a big unified system of thought about scientific investigation. Organized science already has its champions, myself included, who treat it every day in the journals with the profound respect due a great intellectual enterprise. So it is with the idea of restoring some semblance of balance, not to downgrade the intellectual process, that I choose here to present the more capricious side of discovery. To complete the paradox, chance-that seemingly most capricious of topics-will here be given a more systematic examination.
I include a few autobiographical and factual documents of psychoanalytical interest about the writer, agreeing with Jung when he said, "Creative man is a riddle that we may try to answer in various ways, but always in vain, a truth that has not prevented modern psychology from turning now and again to the question of the artist and his art."'
Many helped bring this book into being. I am grateful to the following persons for their helpful comments at various stages in the preparation of the manuscript: Paul, Bertha, Judith, Scott, and Lynn Austin, Dr. Stephen Bondy, Dr. John Conger, Mr. Norman Cousins, Mr. Dan Gillmor, Mrs. Helene Jordan, Dr. Robert Katzman, Mr. Joseph Mori, Dr. Gerhard Nellhaus, and Dr. Stuart Schneck.
Special thanks go to Mrs. Kathleen Ogsbury, Mrs. Bea Belmont, and Miss Toni Cervenka, who not only typed but deciphered the manuscript throughout the many steps in its preparation.
Finally, the lecture, and the book, are intended both to honor Saul Korey, who established the first Department of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and to repay part of my scientific debt to him. Saul was a man who in a brief span of only forty-five years achieved with grace the magical union so many of us aspire to: clinical neurologist, investigator, teacher, administrator, and stimulator of creativity in others,' a direct man, inviting controversy-a stimulating, vital, and altogether refreshing human being. We need more like him.
James H. Austin, M.D.
Denver, Colorado
April, 1977
By Way of Introduction
The picture is not thought out and determined beforehand, rather while it is being made it follows the mobility of thought. Finished, it changes further, according to the condition of him who looks at it.
Pablo Picasso
This is a personal narrative, and the reader is entitled to an autobiographical glimpse or two. Some images readily pass across my mind's eye.
I start as a hybrid. Take, for instance, my grandfathers, whose names I bear. I remember one, James Austin, Jr., as a poet, a liberal humanist lawyer, and later a kindly judge in the court of domestic relations in Toledo, Ohio. He must have had restless legs as a young man because he hiked and bicycled a great deal, and he regularly walked a total of six miles to work and back until he retired. "The Judge" also read voluminously and delighted in problem solving: two crossword puzzles a day for many years. My other grandfather, Henry Holtkamp, started out as a schoolteacher, and later, pursuing his musical hobby as an organist, went into pipe
organ manufacturing in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Judge's wife, Mina, had a brother, Gus, who lived outdoors whenever he could. He loved to hunt with his favorite pointer, Dash, and it was said that my own father strongly resembled his legendary Uncle Gus. My mother's mother, Sophia Holtkamp; passed on her love for the earth itself. From her I learned the good elemental feel of dirt between the fingers while I tilled, planted, weeded, and harvested vegetables from her garden. It was she, gentle lady, who gave her young grandson the old Indian hatchet head made of basalt that launched my Indian collection and sparked my interest in archaeology.
I recall: the boy of seven questioning his parents, "What is it exactly about the chemical make-up of things that causes a color to be a color?" ... the lad of ten dissecting with great curiosity an old (and very dead) alley cat, noticing that the distended bag in the lower abdomen must be the urinary bladder ... and the skinny seventeen-year-old, who persisted for two hours over the spoor of the rabbit in the snow until he finally caught (and then released) the rabbit.
Also far distant in the background, but formative, I can recall the youth fascinated with biological topics of all kinds, animals and woodlore above all. I grew up reading, and rereading all the wild animal and outdoor stories of Ernest Thompson Seton.
In particular, there were the memorable summers on Uncle Gibby's farm in Ohio, listening to him discourse about a patient in his deep, resonant rumble, having free time to browse among his medical books. Here was the place a boy from the city could fall in love with the earth and the sky, working in hay fields, going fishing at every opportunity, and seeking out unknown paths for exploration in the dark woods. And here, finally, while weeding the vegetable garden, I tingled to the discovery of my first Indian arrowhead! Then, at age fourteen, there came the bout of severe pneumonia, when I could watch my own life being saved by a new sulfa drug. Medicine, not outdoor writing, would thereafter become my goal.
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