George P. Smith,
George P. Smith, a Nobel laureate and professor and molecular biologist, is being honoured by B.C.’s Simon Fraser University for his invention of “phage display,” which led to the new drugs to combat diseases including cancer, arthritis and Alzheimer’s.
Greetings virtual graduates! This accursed pandemic gives me the privilege of addressing you at far greater length than the administration would — very wisely — have permitted at a real convocation in happier times. My subject is the culture in which conspicuous innovations such as scientific discoveries and technological advances arise.
Frances Arnold, Greg Winter and I received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for chemical innovations inspired by evolution in the natural world. And indeed natural evolution is a peerless engine of innovation, as the stupendous diversity and exquisite adaptations of living things attest. Here, joining a long succession of writers, I will draw a parallel between the evolution of diversity and adaptations in the natural world and the emergence of innovations in human society.
Ideas, such as the ideas behind innovations, have often been likened to genes. I’m going to use a closely related but more timely metaphor: viruses. That’s more timely not just because of the current coronavirus pandemic, but also because Greg and I were recognized for work involving phages, which are viruses that infect bacterial cells.
Just as viruses infect cells, ideas infect our brains when we read, listen or observe what others write, say or do. Inside our brains, these “viruses” not only proliferate, but also change. They undergo “mutations” when we change them in tiny, localized ways; and they experience promiscuous sex when multiple ideas of separate origin mix up with each other in our brains to engender new offspring ideas that are mongrels of multiple parentage.
Then when we in turn write, speak or do things, we release our ideas out into the environment, where they can infect new brains. Ideas, like viruses, thus proliferate at prodigious rates, changing at prodigious rates as they do so.
Just as ruthless culling by natural selection balances the proliferation of viruses, so cultural selection balances the proliferation of ideas. The vast majority of ideas die of neglect, before or after they’re released into the environment; a tiny minority infect new brains, where they proliferate and change in turn.
Innovation among living things is not a property of individual organisms or species, but rather an unpredictable emergent property of huge ecological provinces of the biosphere or even ultimately its entirety. This is equally true of innovation in the human ideosphere, which depends in unpredictable ways on massive sharing of infectious ideas.
When I, as a supposed innovator, catalogue the intellectual contributions of my fellow scientists to “my” innovation (phage display technology), I’m hard pressed to identify any contributions that remain truly my own.
By the same token, almost all the ramifications that have made phage display prominent enough to be recognized by a Nobel Prize are likewise contributions by my fellow scientists, including my co-laureate Greg Winter. My role has been not so much a creator as a temporary host for community-acquired intellectual infections.
It seems that the most a scientist can reasonably aspire to personally is to be a diligent host for infectious ideas, doing her or his best to promulgate them in the community — by explaining them clearly to students and colleagues in written and spoken word, by illustrating them with workmanlike experiments, by distributing the resulting material resources freely among fellow scientists. But is this not in itself an estimable ambition?
If we as a society want our culture, including science, to be creative, there’s no choice but to sustain the broad cultural community. Any attempt to enhance innovation by narrowly focusing resources on an elite cadre of supposedly creative individuals endangers innovation because we can’t know in advance who in retrospect will be regarded as outstanding innovators, and because we would impoverish the creative ideosphere in which the cadre would have to work.
Teachers are a core component of our cultural community. We willingly pay kindergarten teachers — not enough! — because they enrich society by infecting our and other children’s brains with ideas. It’s true that a few of these kindergartners will go on to write heartrending novels, compose poignant music, midwife world-changing inventions, etc. But we value teachers’ work in its own right, not just because it occasionally contributes at many removes to conspicuous cultural achievements.
Such achievements are rare, unpredictable byproducts of the vibrant, allencompassing culture of a free people. You, as graduates of the highest rung of the educational edifice, have a special mission to propagate and enrich our culture in your own way, and to take pride in doing so.
The most a scientist can reasonably aspire to personally is to be a diligent host for infectious ideas, doing her or his best to promulgate them in the community