Century-Old Advice

I’ve been recently reading translations of some century-old books. One of these is Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s Advice for a Young Investigator first published in 1897. I read the Swanson & Swanson translation based on the 4^th edition of Cajal’s book from 1916. I’m not a young investigator anymore, but I’d like to think I’m young at heart and continue to be excited at the prospect of learning new things as I pursue my research projects. What advice does Cajal have?

 

In Chapter 2 (“Beginner’s Traps”), Cajal makes a number of points. First, he says that “excessive admiration for the work of great minds is one of the most unfortunate preoccupations of intellectual youth”. He thinks many of the young scientists of his day (at least in Spain) defer too much to authority. It’s good to be respectful of great achievers of the past, but it can deter the young investigator from original and creative discovery. Second, Cajal deplores the mindset that thinks the most important problems are already solved. Young investigators scratching the surface of a field quickly find as they dig into the literature that many of their initial ideas (typically low-hanging fruit) have already been picked and picked apart. Third, Cajal says that “some people claim a lack of ability for science to justify failure and discouragement”.

 

I don’t think I’m subjected to these three plagues, maybe because I am no longer young. I do have admiration for the great scientific achievements, but having read a fair bit of history (as a hobby), I’ve learned that many of these beautiful and stunning ideas came bit by bit along with false trails, confusion, and serendipity. Since I work on the origin-of-life, a wide-open problem, there are so many more questions than answers. And while I’ve gotten good at picking low-hanging fruit, it’s admittedly made me a bit lazy to tackle very difficult problems. Or maybe I’m good at avoiding failure. On the other hand, when I think of my undergraduate student researchers, they certainly defer a lot to authority. It’s hard for me to get them to argue with me. They’re also novices when it comes to combing the scientific literature (i.e., they don’t know what they don’t know). And as a mentor, I always start them on low-hanging fruit projects – which I think is a way to introduce them to research and encourage them in the process. Even so, many things they try will not work, as they soon discover!

 

In Chapter 4 (“What Newcomers to Biological Research Should Know”), Cajal begins with the importance of breadth in one’s education. He says “the biologist does not limit his studies to anatomy and physiology, but also grasps the fundamentals of psychology, physics and chemistry.” Why is this important? Biology, chemistry, and physics are tightly interwoven and “bringing together ideas that were previously unlinked” is a fruitful enterprise for new discoveries. Cajal also claims that “the study of philosophy offers good preparation and excellent mental gymnastics for the laboratory worker”. As an advocate for the liberal arts and someone who has personally enjoyed interdisciplinary connections, I wholeheartedly agree with Cajal in this regard. But breadth alone as a dilettante is not enough. Cajal says “it is too easy to run aground on the shoal of encyclopedic learning, where minds incapable of orderliness – who are restless, undisciplined, and unable to concentrate attention on a single idea for any length of time – tend to stop.” Hence, one also needs to specialize and delve deep into a chosen area of research. In today’s faddish lingo, our educational institutions claim to nurture “T-shaped learners”, broad and deep. How we actually do this and whether we are successful at it is open to question.

 

Cajal’s book is a quick read. It’s pithy and quotable. He’s very direct and goes straight for the jugular. Warning – it also has misogynistic parts, as one might expect from the milieu and culture of his own time and place, Spain in the late nineteenth century. I read a chapter a day, taking just 15-20 minutes for each session. In contrast, a much slower read is The Intellectual Life by A. D. Sertillanges, first published in 1873. I’m reading the fifth printing of the English translation by Mary Ryan. It’s not a long book. The first few chapters are hard to get through. And I’m only halfway through, reading one chapter each week (which takes me an hour or so). I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like a work that needs to be slowly consumed to reap its benefits.

 

In Chapter 5 (“The Field of Work”), Sertillanges begins with what he calls “Comparative Study”. Essentially, it’s an exhortation for interdisciplinary learning and also to be both broad and deep. T-shaped learning again. Sertillanges discusses it in the context of wisdom. “It is not wise, it is not fruitful, even if one has a very clearly limited special subject, to shut oneself up in it forthwith. That is putting on blinkers. No branch of knowledge is self-sufficing; no discipline looked at by itself alone gives light enough for its own paths. In isolation it grows narrow, shrinks, wilts, goes astray at the first opportunity.” I’ve felt this experience in some of my earlier research projects: after a while, they seemed to grow narrow and I sensed the whiff of death. Time to move on.

 

Proverb-like, Sertillanges asks the following rhetorical questions: “Can one study a piece of clockwork without thinking of the adjoining piece? Can one study a bodily organ without considering the body? Neither is it possible to advance in physics or in chemistry without mathematics, in astronomy without mechanics and geology, in ethics without psychology, in psychology without the natural sciences, in anything without history. Everything is linked together, light falls from one subject on another, and an intelligent treatise on any of the sciences alludes more or less to all the others.” Amen, I say, to this. And I’m also reminded that if I’m going to advance in my studies as a physical chemistry, I need to learn more mathematics, one among many areas in which I am deficient.

 

To bring the point home, Sertillanges continues: “Therefore, if you want to have a mind that is open, clear, really strong, mistrust your specialty in the beginning. Lay your foundations according to the height that you aim to reach; broaden the opening of the excavation according to the depth it has to reach. But still you must understand that knowledge is neither a tower nor a well, but a human habitation. A specialist, if he is not a man, is a mere quill-driver; his egregious ignorance makes him like a lost wanderer among men; he is unadapated, abnormal, a fool.”

 

That last sentence is jarring, especially in this day and age, where specialization is key to advancing one’s career in the sciences. The incentives are all in that direction. One might even argue that evolution demands this. If you want a larger slice of the pie (energy being the main commodity for thriving, or minimally staying alive), you have to specialize, but if you do so too much and the environment changes, you are maladapted and you die. The depths we have plumbed in the sciences, to push those further, would you as a single individual ever have the time to broaden your foundation commensurate to the depth (or height) to which you seek to attain? If anything, my experience has been the opposite. I specialized first, and that was what helped me gain early success as a young investigator. Later, I broadened my interests. Are our incentives all screwed up? That being said, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more skeptical or mistrustful of my own specialization – perhaps because I see its limitations and problems more clearly amidst a broader vista.

 

Sertillanges will go on to exhort theology as queen, in particular, he thinks the theophilosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas are the bee’s knees. And some of the early parts of his book share the same misogynisms as Cajal’s book, again a product of the time and milieu of nineteenth century Europe. I don’t agree with much of this. That being said, there are some great nuggets in his book. I read some of his phrases and paragraphs and I wish I had his capacity for language and clear thought. Perhaps there is something to his method. I close today’s post with my favorite selection from Chapter 6 (“The Spirit of Work”) that discusses the limits of reductionism.

 

“A problem cannot be self-contained; by its very nature it exceeds its own limits; for the intelligibility that it presupposes is borrowed from sources higher than itself. What we have said of comparative study guides us here. Every object of our investigation belongs to a whole in which it acts and is acted upon, in which it is subject to conditions and imposes its own; one cannot study it apart. What we call specializing or analysis may indeed be a method, it must not be a spirit. Shall the worker be the dupe of his own device? I isolate a bit of mechanism so as to see it better; but while I hold it in my hand and examine it with my eyes, my thought must keep it in its place, see it as part of a whole – otherwise I am falsifying the truth both as regards the whole mechanism which I have made incomplete, and as regards the part which has become incomprehensible.”