The bottom line

In the springtime, young men’s thoughts turn to love, but old men begin to contemplate retirement. I have lost count now, but this spring will be either the fourth or fifth time I will have retired and I am now looking forward to the next things I want to do. When I was in my fifties, twenty years ago, I was worried about retirement, having seen what happened to people I knew when they were tossed out of their places in the world. At that time, I decided that the best thing to do when it came to my turn would be to leave before the execution, don a false beard, and aim to start again by applying for a postdoc position in a new laboratory and in a different subject. I soon realised that this would be technically quite difficult to arrange. I might be able to change my appearance and disposing of the old body would not be difficult because one could always spread the rumour that one’s previous persona had joined a monastery or had become the head of a university. But creating a modest CV and forged letters of reference to cut myself down to postdoc size would not be easy. In practice, I have found that in any new life you have to start at the top in order to set up a new laboratory and then work hard to get to the bottom to do the things that are really important. To do this requires careful judgement of how much administrative incompetence needs to be applied to ensure one’s descent. As, in this operation, the exercise of power and authority is no longer important, it is best to delegate everything to somebody else and concentrate on getting to the bottom as quickly as possible. I predict that this will become progressively easier as we move into the information revolution and as the new cult of dot.communism progressively gains more converts. Mind you, the bottom is not what it used to be. I increasingly notice how everything is becoming de-localised so that it will soon be easy to have virtual research institutes, with virtual laboratories, virtual results and virtual publications. Somebody said to me the other day that, in this era, scientists will arrive at the lab and go straight to their PCs where they will read the literature, do their correspondence, plan their experiments, buy their kits, log into virtual meetings, write papers, and carry out all the other activities of important people in important institutions. What is left out of this plan, I pointed out, is the actual business of doing the experiments. I was told that this would be unnecessary as we could automate everything on a large scale using chips and the like to extract data which, of course, would also be analysed by a computer. All of this ignores the essential role that is played in science by face to face contact between individuals. I have found that this can quite often spark off new ideas, because when one of the participants gets something wrong the first time it is discussed, this allows the other suddenly to see something new. For this to happen, everybody involved must be at the bottom and reasonably, but not totally, ignorant about the field, while being willing to say what is in their head, ill-formed though it may be. This does not happen in group meetings, seminars or any of the other formalised interactions we have in science. I have been meeting quite a number of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in different universities over the last few months. Inevitably, somewhere between the turkey on croissant and the ice cream dessert the conversation turns to the question of whether I have any advice for them. Which fields should they go into? Where will there be new breakthroughs? And what are the best places to go to? Many years ago I learned how best to give advice to people. It requires a face to face conversation and all I have to do is listen carefully and see if I can discover what it is my client really wants to do. Then I advise him or her to do just that. In this way, I have quite a good record of giving advice. This can’t be done in a group meeting, because nothing general can be said that isn’t at the same time completely vacuous. So if faced with a group, after a few platitudes (and plongitudes) I advise those present to take absolutely no notice of my advice. And when they ask me about my scientific successes, I assure them that these depended on my not taking advice from anybody, and especially not from people experienced in the subject. A reader recently complained to me that my columns were becoming too serious. This suggests that I am rising to the top of the columnwriting business and that retirement will soon be necessary. Clearly, I need to give urgent consideration to how to get to the bottom again. The last time I did so was when this column changed its name from Loose ends to False starts upon moving from the end to the front of the journal; so perhaps I should now become a centrefold and the column could be called Middle page. R287