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Person to Person: Human Interaction and Scientific Creativity T
his editorial continues a discussion about scientific creativity that was started last month. It also was prompted by a mundane task: a recent culling of over four decades’ worth of paper travel files (roughly eight linear feet) provoked by an office space crisis. The files were a trip down memory lane—records of conferences attended and lectures given as well as notes about interesting people encountered and ideas stirred by personal conversations. I was reminded of professional friends met and made; some are now gone, some were then young and are now prominent, and others were lost from scholarship when they moved into administration. While reducing the paper pile to a short stack, I was repeatedly reminded of the influences that past personal conversations had on my own subsequent scholarship. This editorial explores the importance of personal interactions to the progress of chemical research. Creative thinking drives the progress of chemistry. It is a highly complex human process but is undoubtedly promoted and enhanced by external stimuli. The stimuli include the published literature, personal interactions with other scholars, and the act of teaching students, all of which lead to, for want of a better phrase, moments of synthesis. Familiarity with the published results of one’s research forerunners is a standard foundation of research progress. Learning which results define the edge of interesting knowledge—and which are reliable— is a crucial underpinning of creative thinking that grows ever more challenging with the enormous expansion of the chemical literature. Even with the help of powerful search engines, information overload is a serious contemporary problem and a complication to using the chemical literature as a sole source of stimulus to creative insight. Well-prepared critical reviews and personal interactions at conferences and seminar visits provide a rich filter that helps a scholar—pardon the oversimplification—identify the real edges of knowledge. I enormously value the office visits with faculty that typically are part of seminar trips; a personalized
© 2006 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
short story about another’s theme of research is an extraordinary gift that can expand one’s own horizon of interests. Conversations at conferences have the same effect but in a more eclectic manner. Questions following one’s own lectures can be lodestones of information and can uncover important blind spots. (Speakers who present good results yet leave no time for questions deprive themselves of this feedback.) The character of these various personal interactions is strongly colored by the openness of the participants and their willingness to trust one another in candid give-and-take. Teaching is another important source of stimulus to changes in thinking. On numerous occasions, I have experienced new insights from students and postdoctoral fellows who require me to explain (or defend) a topic or idea in new ways and who push out ideas of their own. Such moments are a blessing of the teaching profession. Again, note that these are personal interactions. Lastly, there are the indefinable but often memorable moments of synthesis, when the foundation formed by these stimuli spontaneously reassembles itself into new insights into chemical processes and measurements. These events sneak up on you in unexpected moments: in the shower, while running, at breakfast, or while half-asleep at 2 a.m. (that is my preferred time, it seems). The insights may be new understandings or new questions. Call this creativity at work, and while you’re at it, realize that important creativity is hard work. A lot of effort was expended in laying the synthetic foundation. Science builds upon itself through the research literature and through personal interactions between scholars. The popular image of the chemistry genius who calls forth invention without effort is science fiction.
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