Hero worship

This month, as the surest route to public embarassment, I decided to write about scientific heroes. Today’s world is full of talk of mentoring. Graduate students are told to find supervisors who will intellectually nourish them, emotionally support them, and teach them networking and grantspersonship. As I tap away, I can almost hear Uncle Syd muttering that the world is going to the dogs. In his politically incorrect youth, when scientific giants roamed the earth, before the invention of mentors and mentees, the source of inspiration was the hero. Has the scientific hero gone the way of the dodo and the Warburg manometer? I think not. Wonderful though mentors can be, you have to find one with the time and energy to talk to you, and persuade them that you and your career are worth watching over. But a hero doesn’t even need to know that you exist to spur you into a frenzy of emulation. Because they don’t know you’re there, you can have as many as you like, and you can drop them without fear. And since you usually worship your idol’s deeds from afar, you don’t need to find them attractive, a master of conversation, a paragon of wit, or even a likeable human being. So how do you go about finding heroes? As the ‘Personals’ columns say, it’s harder than you think. The Web, the 90s solution to everything, just doesn’t work; a home page is no guide to heroism. What about spending a small fortune of your advisor’s money to go to a ski meeting where all the stars in your field will be talking? Better, but still not quite there. A good orator can fool all of the people some of the time. Seeing a hero at the beginning of your relationship only reduces their mythic status and deprives you of the entertainment of trying to guess what they look like. “Eureka!” you cry, as you order a lifetime personal subscription to a journal whose advertisements assure you that you cannot live without it. Not so fast. Will today’s hot paper stand the test of time? As a first-year graduate student I was enthralled by the prospect of understanding embryonic development and genomic complexity through quantitative nucleic acid hybridization. But ask today’s students what Cot and Rot curves are and they’ll tell you that one is a sort of bed and the other is what happens to the teeth of a post-doc who lives on chocolate and beer. The best place to find your hero is in the bowels of your local library, among journals more than ten years old. Led on by references from scholarly reviews, you’ll find a paper whose elegance, precision, and timelessness drags your mind away from the smells of stale coffee and decaying bindings. Inspired, you’ll trudge through the stacks to find more papers by the same author. If they’re as refreshing as the first, you’ve found a hero worth worshipping. Life is always more interesting if you name names, so here are three heroes and their heroic qualities. First, Bruce Nicklas, for the beauty of his experiments. I discovered his work as I was preparing to write the introduction to my thesis. Led to the old-journal section of a bunker-like library by an enigmatic phrase in a review, I found ‘Chromosome manipulation III. Induced reorientation and the experimental control of segregation in meiosis’ (J Cell Biol 1969, 43:40–50). This paper describes how Nicklas used a fine glass needle to move chromosomes attached to the spindle of a grasshopper spermatocyte, and how he reached the astonishing conclusion that mechanical tension determines the stability of a chromosome’s attachment to the spindle. My second hero is Lee Hartwell, for the elegance and power of his ideas. The story of how I was led to him has a biblical flavor. In the summer of 1979, I was taking the embrology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Wood’s Hole, USA, when David Botstein appeared as a rather unlikely John the Baptist preaching to a group of recalcitrant developmental biologists. Forget sea urchins, he cried, the future is coming, every inch of it is yeast genetics, and you should all be worshipping at the feet of Lee Hartwell. The sermon was followed by a tremendous theological argument, and after the requisite trip to the library I became a steadfast Hartwellian. My last choice, Tim Hunt, breaks the rules I set out above. I claim him as a hero rather than as a mentor because it is his attitude towards science that has been his most important influence on me. One of the little lies of science is our claim that we pursue knowledge as a community, that we don’t care which individual finds out the answer to a question. Two months in graduate school or half a session at a conference can convert the most starry-eyed student into a crabby cynic intent on protecting their latest results from spying eyes. But in Tim’s case the myth is the reality — he has often enthusiastically helped his own competitors answer questions that he was struggling to answer himself. Best of all, every one of my heroes has disproved the egregious maxim ‘nice guys finish last’.