From Mendel to Lovecraft, Crick and beyond

The amateurs, by Degas

Being total outsiders to the fields they’re interested in, amateurs are often the most innovative, dedicated and talented researchers and entrepreneurs.

This insight came to me a couple of years ago, as I was reading various books about genetics and biology, most notably “The Double Helix” from James Watson and “The Gene” from Siddartha Mukhajee.

Both books are fascinating reads on their own. If you’re into reading lists for your summer holidays, you should definitely add them if you’ve never read them before.

But one thing stands out. It’s how the discovery of DNA and Genetics was mainly done through amateur research and not through Big Science.

Mendel, as an Abbot

As described in “The Gene”, Mendel was not a biologist but a monk. He even got rejected twice when he tried to pass the exam to become a biology teacher. As a friar in his abbey, he managed to cultivate a patch of pea plants in the garden and used it as real-scale data experiment with seven characteristics of pea plants: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. With seed color, he showed that when a yellow pea and a green pea were bred together their offspring plant was always yellow. However, in the next generation of plants, the green peas reappeared at a ratio of 1:3. To explain this phenomenon, Mendel coined the terms “recessive” and “dominant” in reference to certain traits.

He published only one article in 1866 called “Experiments on plants hybridization”, demonstrating the actions of invisible “factors” — now called genes — in providing for visible traits in predictable ways.

As Mendel who failed at his exams, others are not always amateurs by choice. “The Glass Universe” chronicles the “Harvard Computers” who were a devoted team of female amateur astronomers at a time when no academic accreditation was available to women. They came together at the Harvard Observatory at the end of the nineteenth century around an unprecedented quest to catalog the cosmos by classifying the stars and their spectra. Their calculations became the basis for the discovery that the universe is expanding.

Outside of science, HP Lovecraft was the Vice-President of the National Amateur Press Association and he wrote in “Writings in the United Amateur”:

In many respects the word ‘amateur’ fails to do full credit to amateur journalism and the association which best represents it. To some minds the term conveys an idea of crudity and immaturity, yet the United can boast of members and publications whose polish and scholarship are well-nigh impeccable. In considering the adjective ‘amateur’ as applied to the press association, we must adhere to the more basic interpretation, regarding the word as indicating the non-mercenary nature of the membership. Our amateurs write purely for love of their art, without the stultifying influence of commercialism. Many of them are prominent professional authors in the outside world, but their professionalism never creeps into their association work. The atmosphere is wholly fraternal, and courtesy takes the place of currency.

I first came upon the importance of Amateurs upon the reading of Freeman Dyson’s “Science on a rampage”, a review of “Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything” an awesome essay on amateur physicists and their amateur theories.

In it, he described amateurs as:

“people rejected by the academic establishment and rejecting orthodox academic beliefs” And he added: “They are often self-taught and ignorant of higher mathematics. Mathematics is the language spoken by the professionals. The amateurs offer an alternative set of visions. Their imagined worlds are concrete rather than abstract, physical rather than mathematical.”

But amateurs are more common than we would think. Indeed, a successful amateur will end up earning a living out of this passion. And specialists of one discipline can end up being an amateur in another one, where they will excel and produce incredible results.

Linus Pauling, amateur biologist, on the left

If Watson was a biologist, Francis Crick was a physicist. And the invention of the double-helix structure of the DNA was not only prompted through careful biology science experiments, but also through the tinkering of wooden molecular 3d models looking like kids toys and promoted by Linus Pauling, another physicist and another Nobel-prize winner.

In his book “the double helix”, Watson consistently repeat that they were not insiders from the field, which is why they were more interested in trying to modelize the DNA with the “stupid” 3D wooden models inspired by Pauling, rather than interpret X-Ray diffraction results as their colleagues were doing. In the end, it’s that difference that helped them to achieve faster and better results than the other teams.

Indeed, Watson ended up being extremely critical of the traditional researcher :

“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that , in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”

And he added about himself and Crick:

“[Science moves] with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.”

A scholarly butterfly drawing by Nabokov

Other example abounds. Such as Nabokov who had a passion for entomology. He wrote a scholarly paper for “The Entomologist” when he was a student in Cambridge. Once a famous writer, he ended up joining Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. And his butterfly drawings have been published posthumously by Yale University Press under the name “Fine Lines”.

But where can amateurs flourish more than on the Internet. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia was himself an amateur, whose knowledge of computers and the Internet derived more from Multi User Dungeons than from theoretical classes. A few years ago, he famously feuded with Andrew Keen who looked surprised at this new rise in power of the Amateurs when he wrote “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture”.

He was wrong of course. Amateurs have always been there. They’re a source of curiosity, serendipity and innovation. And it’s never been a better time to be one.

Update: a comment on Hacker News gave me two other famous amateurs who turned to be great scientists: