Transcriber: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Hello everybody.
I have no idea what Thodoris actually said,
so I assume it must be correct.
I think I heard Alexander Fleming.
I’ve been at the Fleming for two and a half years now.
I came from MIT, and I just want to say,
these have been the best two and a half years of my scientific life.
The Fleming is an absolutely world class institution.
And it’s been a real privilege to work there.
What I’m going to be talking about today
is an idea about the future of science,
which I and a few colleagues of mine came up with a couple of years ago.
But it started really with the realization --
this is a wonderful photograph of a great painter called Hans Hartung –
the realization that there was something missing in Science.
Now look at Hartung, and this is one of his paintings.
And he painted that when I think he was about 82.
And one day, at an exhibition, some guy comes up to him
and says: “My 6-year-old son could do this.”
And Hans Hartung, quick as a flash, replied:
“Yes, but what’s amazing is I’m 80 and I’m still doing it.”
(Laughter)
And this is the kind of thinking that got us started on
“What would it be like to be like Hartung, but as a scientist.”
In other words, how do you stay young as a scientist?
Now this is what I want to talk about in this lecture.
Now, when I was a kid, I was brought up in France,
so all these books will have French titles.
The science lessons in French school were called “Leçons de Choses”,
which means “Lessons of Things”.
I can think of no better description of science than “Lessons of Things”.
You could have “Leçons de choses”, or “Belles leçons de choses”
and then if you happened to be living in French West Africa
you would have “Leçons de Choses Tropicales”,
which unfortunately I never got.
Now, we used to have posters in the classroom.
And this is a good example, where you have the egg,
and you explain the egg every possible way.
So for example, the egg shell, material science,
why the egg cooks is protein denaturation, chemistry of carbonates.
You can cook an egg, you’re six years old and you can try and cook an egg –
zoology, embryology, nutrition.
And you see, what we were being taught was science as all of one piece.
Basically "ab ovo", so to speak, the science was one science.
Then what happens is you start going to high school,
but in the meantime, if you’re a curious child, you read lots of things.
This is a random selection of the places where I found information,
just by picking up books and so on and so forth,
really building up a general knowledge about everything
that excited and made me curious.
And basically what happens after a few years of this,
is you become “Kserolas”. (Laughter)
Which is terrible, my parents used to complain, you know, “Oh God!”
By the way, this wonderful Greek word means “Know-All”
but in English I think it’s known as a "Know-It-All".
So, this state of being a kserolas is actually extremely desirable,
but it’s very hard to maintain.
And one of the things that happens is you go to high school and college and so on
and all of a sudden you start being shunted into biology on one hand,
and physics on the other hand.
Now notice the difference between biology and physics.
Biology, really beautiful, I mean, very attractive-looking insect, full of color.
Who wouldn’t want to do that?
Now physics, an X-ray of a low energy bulb?
This is kind of off-putting for many people,
so they try to make it more exciting, but it still looks like hard work.
(Laughter)
So, by this time people are already choosing
whether they want hard work or pretty insects.
So what happens is, they divide, they discreate it,
which continues through one’s studies and professional life.
And it gets worse, as a matter of fact, because ten years later,
when you get a little more specialized,
you're reading --actually this is very interesting stuff-- but seriously.
(Laughter)
You’re reading books like this,
or perhaps even more interesting books like this,
(Laughter)
and by that time these two people never meet,
and if they met, they would have very little to talk to each other about.
This is a major problem.
So, what happens eventually really is this,
that as Mahatma Gandhi correctly put it,
“You end up knowing everything about nothing”.
And this is a major problem. It wasn’t always like this.
And in particular, it wasn’t like this
at the beginning of Europe’s organized intellectual life in the Middle Ages.
This is a temperature chart of the Middle Ages,
I’m sure you’ve heard of the medieval warm period,
which lasted about 250 years.
That’s when people got out of doors and started walking around.
And that’s when all the great universities of Europe were founded.
And as you’ve probably heard there is a bit of warming now,
so I think there is hope for another intellectual revolution.
So, all these universities were founded in that brief period
and everything stopped with the Black Death in 1348.
What was happening then was really quite extraordinary,
and some characters, some people emerged out of this,
that still stand as towering intellects, centuries later.
One was Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great.
He was German, he worked in Paris.
And the other one was Roger Bacon,
an English philosopher who worked in Oxford.
Now these two people, and only these two people,
have one extraordinary thing in common.
They were both awarded a title
which has never been given to anyone else in history.
And it is the letters D.U., as Thodoris said, Doctor Universalis.
Why were they Doctor Universalis? Quite simply, they knew everything.
They were the real, genuine kserolas.
And they were supposed to be able to teach everything.
Now we don’t make them anymore, but when did we stop making them?
Well, there’s some arguement about that.
But generally speaking, people would agree
that the last man to know everything was Thomas Young.
And if you read Thomas Young’s biography, it’s kind of humiliating.
By page 10 he’s already done more
than any scientist that I’ve come across did in his whole life.
So, he was a doctor, he was a physicist,
he’s the guy who proved light was made of waves.
In his spare time he deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs
at the same time as Champollion in France.
And he didn’t want to tell anybody about all this stuff
because he thought that patients would no longer come
and be treated by him if they knew he was busy with hieroglyphs,
so he published under a pseudonym all these great things.
Now if we jump forward a century or so, this is Enrico Fermi,
the great Italian physicist,
who’s widely held to be the last man to know all of physics.
And if you look at the books he wrote, it’s plausible.
Notice that the photograph on his desk,
I don’t know if you can see, it says “secret”.
On the picture he has on his desk.
Which tells you that scientists are a terrible security risk.
He has a picture of himself with a secret photograph on it.
Now, if you look at the frequency of occurrence of the words
“natural philosophy”, “specialist” and “interdisciplinary” as a function of time
-- this is from Google Ngrams –
you’ll find that natural philosophy, which is what science used to be called,
has decreased exponentially through time.
People no longer describe themselves as natural philosophers.
The word “specialist”, started at the turn of the 20th century
and grew linearly ever since.
And with about a 90-year-lag,
the word “interdisciplinary” is following the same trajectory,
which means that the more specialists you create,
the more desperate you get to have interdisciplinary people
to compensate for their specialized ignorance.
So, what we really want --
we go back to this dreadful existential choice
between termites on one hand and muons on the other hand –
what we really want is to break down the barriers
between termites and muons.
This may not seem easy, but in fact it has been done.
And, in particular, it was done by a remarkable man
that nobody much seems to talk about, Pascual Jordan,
a German scientist who was the co-author
of the second ever paper on quantum mechanics.
If you see on the right there is one citation,
at the bottom of that page, and that’s it.
There is no more citations
and that’s Heisenberg’s first paper on quantum mechanics.
What a wonderful situation to be in. He was 23 years old.
When he published in 1943,
this is during the war, at the height of the war in Germany,
he published a book called “Physics and the Secret of Organic Life”,
which I bought secondhand,
and on page 68 it has a chapter entitled “Quantum Biology”.
This is totally insane, why should biology be quantum, right?
This is muons and termites living together.
And in fact the book had inside it the receipt from the person
who ordered it in Berlin in ’43.
A neatly typed receipt for – let’s see – 8 Reichsmarks.
Amazing, that they would still be printing books under the bombs.
Anyway, I can prove that I’m a quantum biologist
because that’s what it says on my door,
and that makes me, I suppose, a little kserolas.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But I’m in extremely good company of other little kserolas,
namely, these very fine people, most of them physicists,
who have contributed to putting together this Doctor Universalis idea.
So, let me explain to you what we have in mind.
The physicist species has a big head and is quite aggressive,
if you’ve ever given a talk in the presence of a physicist,
particularly a theoretical physicist,
you’ll find that they’re terrifying.
They’re like warrior termites.
The biologist, by contrast, is the kind of harmless creature
and really quite attractive in many ways.
And what we’re trying to do is to create
a very large, powerfully built, but not particularly aggressive species,
called the “Doctor Universalis”.
This will take commitment, time and money.
The commitment we have already, but let me talk about the time, timeline.
So, the difficulty -- well, people would say,
“My God, aren’t we spending enough time in college already?
Do you really want to spend extra years making kserolas?
Is that a good idea?”
Think about it, in the Middle Ages, when there was very little to know,
people spent 5 or 6 years in college.
700 years later, knowledge has increased a billion fold
and we still spend 5 or 6 years in college.
There’s something wrong there.
Now you will say, well, you can only go to so many parties
and get drunk so many times.
(Laughter)
That’s the reason why the studies have the same length,
your liver gives out after that.
But what we’re planning to do of course
is to have actually a different structure.
We start at 18 like everyone else,
high school diploma, have a normal 4-year degree,
preferably in physical sciences because if you’re going to use mathematics
you’ll have to learn it somewhere fairly early,
and then an 8-year double doctorate.
Now, the length of doctorates varies quite a bit,
in Europe it tends to be 3 or 4 years,
in the US it averages around 6. So 8 years should just about cover it.
And one assumes, although it’s not decided of course,
whether people will have to write two theses,
one in the biological sciences and one in the physical sciences.
Or one which combines both.
After that, the people will come out and be like 4-wheel drive,
they'll be the SUV of the intellect, they will be able to go anywhere.
And indeed they will probably go to lots of interesting places.
Now, how much is this going to cost?
This is the question, when I talked about this
to professional policy makers in science,
they start seeing euro signs, you know.
And the answer is, it’s going to cost a lot of money.
A very simple calculation, suppose we have 12 of these dudes “manufactured”
– that’s 12 as in the 12 apostles –
40 thousand euros per year.
This is not pay, this is pay plus expenses.
The lab time is 8 years, that’s 3.84 million euros.
If anybody here has brought a checkbook,
please come and see me after the lecture.
And... (Laughter) (Applause)
And that’s it actually. Thank you very much.
(Applause)