What makes a great scientist?

Source: Roelingmp/Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

I want to introduce you to an incredible psychiatric researcher you likely don’t know, Lindon Eaves, who died last month in Richmond, Virginia.

When I was a medical student at the Medical College of Virginia in the middle 1980s, I signed up for a summer research elective in psychiatry. The elective was based in the genetics research group, headed by the geneticist Lindon Eaves and the psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler.

I had two months of summer vacation, July and August, between my first and second years of medical school. That’s not much time to do research, especially for a 21-year-old who had never done any research.

I showed up at the genetics group and met Lindon Eaves. He was a whirl of energy in his forties, with tousled hair, wide thick glasses, and a loud, thick British accent. I was assigned to his student Andrew Heath, a think, quiet young man with a quiet thick British accent. Eaves and his student, I learned, had recently arrived in Virginia as emigres from Margaret Thatcher’s cutbacks in government support for research in the UK.

They had come to Richmond, recruited by the genetics department, which had obtained funding for twin research. A few years later, Kendler came from Yale to join the genetics group and help it obtain funding and direct its work in clinical psychiatry.

In the ensuing half-century, Kendler became famous in the world of psychiatry, widely published, well-funded, highly cited, prominent in DSM revisions.

Eaves, in the meantime, published less and less in psychiatry and more and more in the behavior genetics field, where his students spread his influence. But psychiatrists don’t know him.

In the few formative months that I worked with him, I learned a few things about science and research that I’ve never forgotten and that I’ve taken with me in three decades of my research in clinical psychiatry outside of Eaves’ field of genetics.

I learned from Eaves about the tradition of thinking in genetics and research that traces to the great Ronald Fisher, who invented the greatest revolution in modern medicine, in my view — randomization. So I read a lot about Fisher that summer. And I learned about the great Hans Eysenck, whom I would later meet, a mentor to Eaves.

Eysenck was famous and controversial for various reasons, but what I learned about him was the importance of empirical quantitative research, as opposed to pure speculation, in psychology and psychiatry and the relevance of genetics to human behavior. So I read a lot about Eysenck that summer.

One day Eaves noticed me with a book about Fisher or Eysenck, and he commented: “I wish I had more time to read! I’m constantly running around doing research, analyzing data, and working on papers. I wish I had time to read!” I learned the importance of continued scholarship.

Another day, we discussed some complex aspects of some data analysis, and Eaves paused and pulled his hands up from his belly, almost shouting: “Sometimes you can’t infer the best hypothesis logically, and then you just have to gut it out!” Gut it out, he exclaimed, with such gusto and that thick Birmingham accent that I’ve never forgotten it.

What did he mean? I expected that science was a rational, clean process. You collected some facts; you interpreted them in some neat theory. That was it. But Eaves taught me science was messy. You collected facts, yes; but it was hard to understand what they meant. You tried one theory or model, then another, then another, trying to get a model that fit the facts best. But in the end, it could be that you just asked the wrong question to begin with.

I thought science was about induction — let the facts speak: they’ll line up nicely into a theory. Or deduction: create a nice theory, and you’ll find the facts support it, or don’t. Eaves was teaching me what later I would learn that the great philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, himself a physicist, called abduction: You just more or less invent a hypothesis out of thin air, without pre-existing facts, and look to experiments to see if the hypothesis is viable.

Gut it out! Eaves meant intuition, imagination — give up your logic and get creative.

He himself was very creative; he created a raft of statistical models for interpreting twin studies in behavior genetics, a series of concepts that never had existed previously — things like models for genotype-environment interaction (where genes have more effects in some environments than others), and for assortative mating (when people marry others with similar traits, environmentally amplifying genetic effects).

He liked to end his lectures with a slide that said: “Be creative! Imagine!” You can’t do good science if you live with current views only; your data won’t fit it well, not because you don’t have enough data, but because your theories aren’t good enough.

Psychiatrists don’t tend to think this way; we’re not very scientific. We take DSM concepts, for instance, as they are, given to us since the third edition of 1980, and we barely change them, even though they don’t fit clinical reality, even though many studies prove them false. We dare not change them because they’re popular.

Eaves would have taught otherwise. He was an iconoclast; he never went along with any popular idea because it was popular. His connection to Eysenck led him to question many standard views in psychology and psychiatry, such as Freudian orthodoxy and proponents of the environment over the relevance of biology and genetics. I learned that a scientist has to be a contrarian. Otherwise, he really isn’t a scientist, since truth isn’t a matter of majority opinion.

He was excited and made science exciting. He was very productive and made science seem important. I never went into psychiatric genetics, but I got the bug of scientific research from Lindon Eaves. He convinced me that scientific research was important, exciting, and worthwhile. Off I went and did my work in the ensuing decades. How right Emerson had it: A teacher never knows where his influence ends.

It was just a summer, just two months in the middle of medical school.

Eaves’ work outside of psychiatry proper was fascinating too. He quantified social and political attitudes, as they are influenced by genetics and environmental influences. He found that a shared environment, meaning family and culture, are the core influences on social and political attitudes. Different families and different cultures engender different attitudes.

This isn’t just an opinion. Eaves proved it. If we understood this idea, we could realize why different social groups and cultures conflict without judging them, and we might also see an avenue for change. Change a culture if you want to change the thinking of its members.

I ran into Lindon only a few times over the following decades when I would visit Richmond. One time I invited him to Boston to give a psychiatric lecture, hoping to expose the medical world to him more. We weren’t close, but when we saw each other, he saw an old raw student growing up, and I saw an old charismatic teacher.

In that intense summer of research, I found out that Lindon was also an Episcopal priest. I saw him show up at the office once with clerical neckwear; I didn’t ask him about it, but I found it consistent with his creativity. We all talked a lot about Darwin and his influence on science, which of course, included a challenge to religion. Lindon could be the ultimate scientist — as true an exemplar of a scientist as I can imagine — and be an Episcopal priest at the same time. I gather that he mainly retired from scientific research in the last decade or so of his life and was prominent in local Episcopal churches. One might say he moved from science to religion as he aged, but it’s not true; he always combined both.

Lindon Eaves didn’t need psychiatry, but psychiatry needed him. It needed his clarification of genetics as related to clinical phenomena, which it still hasn’t properly appreciated. It needed his scholarship, his imagination, his iconoclasm.

It needed to learn from him: Get the data, analyze the data, but please, challenge your theories. Gut it out! Be creative! Imagine!