Collaborators

"The age of the great scientific thinker is over," writes Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal (2/5/11). Jonah says that this is largely "because the nature of our hardest scientific problems has changed." This is evident in that the "’peak age of creativity … has been increasing for the past 500 years." Sir Issac Newton took on calculus and gravity in his 20s, but today "the ideal age for most scientists is closer to 40." Basically, there’s now more to learn, and so scientists need to spend more time mastering a field before they can transform it.

A related problem is the "death of the Renaissance man." Guys like Leonardo "made important contributions to such disparate fields as medicine, civil engineering and geology." But "today’s scientists must spend years in graduate school developing an extremely narrow expertise. As a result, they depend on teams to make the crosscutting connections that end up changing the world." Benjamin Jones of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management has documented this in an analysis of "19.9 million peer-reviewed papers and 2.1 million patents."

He and his team found that, "over the last 50 years, more than 99 percent of scientific subfields … have experienced increased levels of teamwork, with the size of the average team increasing by about 20 percent per decade." Their work is also more highly regarded than that of solo scientists: "Papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those with one author." Papers "with at least 1,000 citations … are more than six times as likely to come from a team." All of which means it’s increasingly hard to name a scientist as famous as Einstein or an inventor on the order of Edison. In other words: "Collaboration is no longer an option — it’s a necessity."