Review

It is possible to take crucial steps in life without significant guidance, but those fortunate enough to benefit from a mentor do have significant advantages. A generous guide can provide shared experience, advice, encouragement, networks, and a model to strive for, reach, and excel. But even geniuses like the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan reached adulthood before finding a mentor, and Einstein too did quite well on his own. The pool of potential mentors includes parents, teachers, politicians, religious leaders, and scientists. But exceptional mentors tend to see themselves in exceptional students, and for that reason they are selective about whom they mentor. What advice is available for the overlooked or unselected, the unmentored - but not unmentorable?

One option for them is to immerse themselves in biographies and autobiographies of the great figures in their specialties. There are also many books that provide advice and guidance for the young scientist-to-be or the scientist-in-training. Two of the best were written by exceptional scientists, Advice for a Young Investigator by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (translated by Neely and Larry W. Swanson) and Advice to a Young Scientist by Sir Peter Medawar. Both are still in print, and both offer insights from first-rate minds into aspects of the practical, ethical, and ideal worlds of scientists.

Advice for a Young Investigator was originally written in Spanish in 1897 but was not translated into English until 1951. One of the founding fathers of modern neurobiology and an eventual Nobel Prize winner, Cajal (1852-1934) was also a renaissance man: a teacher, researcher, artist, and mentor. Reflecting on his own youth, Cajal found little guidance in a country that did not encourage the study of science. "Laziness is a religion rather than a vice," Cajal grumbled about 19th-century Spain. It was through determination, patience, and focus that he achieved his scientific goals, most notably his remarkable histological analysis of the nervous system. His singular achievements and humble voice deserve a patient ear nearly 70 years after his death.

Cajal's comments cover the mental prerequisites required of a scientist, the search for mentors, the significance of literature, and even the suitability of wives. The latter comments, one must remember, were written at a time when chauvinism was unquestioned. "A woman," Cajal pronounced, "may be the helium that propels him [the scientist] skyward - or the ballast that forces him to land in the marshes of obscurity during the peak of his flight." A prerequisite for science, Cajal believed, was an "artistic temperament" that finds the diversity and beauty of nature not overwhelming but insightful and challenging. He also expected "a sound critical judgment" that could put aside subjectivity for a sense of objectivity.

The idea of genius saturates the pages of Cajal's book of insights and advice, not as case examples, but by their existence, by the promise of what they can see and achieve. A specialist, Cajal argues, can examine a branch of the tree of learning. A generalist can see the stem and even other branches, but a genius has the ability to see the whole tree of learning. One could argue against this last interpretation. Is a genius a supreme generalist or a supreme specialist? In either case, both the genius and generalist will always need to sample the fruits of the specialist, even of the blue-collar specialist who toils in the seemingly obscure depths of small, specific problems.

Cajal also warns of many social and behavioral pitfalls including the dangers of too-rapid research and of putting the search for material rewards above the passion for truth. And young hero worshipers are warned that "excessive admiration for the work of great minds is one of the most unfortunate preoccupations of intellectual youth."

A contemporary reader may find Cajal's prose a little outdated, and his idealism too far-flung; however, he presents his thoughts with humility. Many of his statements begin with "we." It is as if Cajal is saying "I am speaking to you as a representative of a larger community, a community made up of many individuals of various intellectual capabilities who await a youthful hand to accept the torch."

A more recent book of advice is Sir Peter Medawar's Advice to a Young Scientist, originally published in 1979, but fortunately still in print. It includes more current topics such as "Sexism and Racism in Science" and the emergence of the ever frightful (to the purist) "Science and Administration." Medawar (1915-1987), a Nobel-prize-winning immunologist and author with a reputation for knowing philosophy as well as he does science, is also more analytical in his discussion than Cajal. Experiments, for example, are categorized as Aristolelian, Galilean, Baconian, and Kantian, reflecting the chief proponents of how to observe, theorize, and repeat. Much of our time today is spent utilizing the Galilean method of refuting the "null hypothesis." Medawar, like Cajal, warns against hubris among both young and old scientists. "Excess of confidence in the rightness of their own views" Medawar points out, "is a sort of senile hubris, as offensive in older scientists as excess of hubris in the young."

Understanding how and why we search is as important as the object of our search. Both of these books are useful primers for young scientists. Even today, years after The Double Helix showed that ambition and jealousy fuel scientific endeavors as much as they do other human endeavors, these two guides may still open some eyes among those who find the scientific method too cold, and in a cultural sense, too destructive. And for the older scientific sages, both books could serve as a refresher course, a reminder of their original motivations. Advice for a Young Investigator and Advice to a Young Scientist still offer, decades after their original publication, sometimes quaint but often useful advice from two master researchers.

Tim Tokaryk is a paleontologist in Eastend, Saskatchewan, Canada.

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Endlinks

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1906 - Santiago Ramón y Cajal's award-related information, with a comprehensive biography.

Drawing by Santiago Ramon y Cajal circa 1900 - an artful Cajal drawing of nerve cells.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960 - Peter Medawar's award-related information, with a comprehensive biography.

Some Advice to Young Mathematical Biologists - Kenneth Lange's advice for young scientists, in convenient outline format.

Related HMS Beagle articles:

• Reach Out and Teach Someone - Press Box by Lori Skopp on science education.
• Undergraduate Science Undervalued - Opinion by Carol Berkower.

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