How to Be a Genius: Tool #8
The importance of ‘reversal’
In her new book, Genius Unmasked, Roberta B. Ness picks apart our greatest scientific minds — from Darwin’s to Einstein’s — and assembles a cognitive tool box that anyone can use.
Tool #8: Reversal
Reversal works either by flipping assumptions or by realizing the import of a serendipitous turn of events. Reversals twist our minds around. A funny and heartwarming song by Brad Paisley tells the tale of an apologetic suitor who tries to gain the forgiveness of his true love by sending her serial gifts of flowers. Rather than begging her directly to reignite her love for him, he argues the opposite:
“Stop the senseless killing; can’t you hear those roses cry? Tell me, how many flowers have to die?”
Serendipity, appreciating a “happy accident,” is a particularly potent trigger for innovation. Not everyone grasps the implications of finding the unexpected—but innovators do. Alexander Fleming, father of antibiotics, is the poster child for serendipity. Upon returning to his laboratory from a vacation in 1928, he noticed mold growing on one of his petri dishes. Unfortunately, it had ruined his experiment by killing the Staphylococcus sp. bacteria he was studying. In retrospect, others had experienced the same problem and had simply discarded their failed bacterial plates. But Fleming recognized the mold not as a calamity but an opportunity. He turned the course of his career to focus on how the mold inhibited bacteria. Ultimately, he identified the mold as Penicillium sp., and he called its extract penicillin, which became the first antibiotic.
Serendipity also initiated the era of cancer chemotherapeutics. Mustard gas, a World War I and World War II agent of chemical warfare, was known to cause incapacitating burns of the eyes, skin, and respiratory tract. Its effects were so horrible that production and stockpiling were eventually prohibited by international treaty. Dr. Stewart Alexander, while treating victims of a vast mustard gas spraying by the Germans in Bari, Italy, noticed something unforeseen. Victims’ white blood cells were suppressed—a fact that most scientists would have simply added to a list of mustard’s effects. But Dr. Alexander flipped it. Cancers are the most quickly dividing of all cells. If mustard gas arrested the division of rapidly growing white blood cells, he reasoned, perhaps the agent could be used as a cancer treatment. Indeed, the mustard derivative Mustine, after animal and human testing, became the first chemotherapeutic agent used to combat leukemia.
Serendipity is an accidental reversal. An equally potent creative strategy is to create a purposeful reversal. Darwin lived at a time when the main belief about how life came to be was creationism. God, it was thought, created all species as perfect embodiments of his care and love. Darwin turned this idea on its head. In the theory of natural selection, he posited that the variations that gained dominance by out-competing others in a vicious struggle for survival were initially random. Caring had nothing to do with Mother Nature’s arbitrary mechanism for evolving species.
Roberta Ness is an internationally renowned physician-scientist and author of over 300 scientific papers and books. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine National Academies of Science, a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, and a frequent advisor to the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and Centers for Disease Control. She is a past President of the American College of Epidemiology and President of the American Epidemiology Society.
Featured image credit: Birds, by James Valma. Public domain via Pixabay.
