Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist

Edited by:
  • John Brockman
Pantheon: 2004. 256 pp. $23.95, £16.99 0375422919, 0224072943 | ISBN: 0-375-42291-9
Credit: ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRISTIAN DARKIN

John Brockman asked 27 distinguished scientists from diverse fields, including physics, psychology, biology, mathematics and robotics, to write a short biographical sketch, describing their childhood and what got them hooked on science. The heterogeneity of the essays they wrote serves as an antidote to easy speculation about there being any essential precursors to scientific accomplishment.

Is a scientifically oriented family important? It looks that way at first as you read through the opening piece by psychologist Nick Humphrey. One of his early memories — vividly described — is of being taken by his grandfather on Boxing Day to dissect a frog in the empty, silent anatomy department of University College, London. The grandfather, as it happens, has a Nobel prize in physiology, and is just one family figure in a distinguished panoply. Humphrey candidly writes: “What I gained from this childhood environment was a sense of intellectual entitlement — a right to ask questions, to pry, to provoke, to go where I pleased in pursuit of knowledge.”

That sense of intellectual entitlement is echoed by cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik. She writes of her parents' devotion to their children's intellectual lives, not with a view to “enrichment” or “achievement”, but with a gift for making such intellectual activity “the accepted, ordinary, happy way that civilized people went about their lives”. Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, recalls a similarly intense intellectual life in his family circle: “The intense and animated discussions were invariably about new ideas, usually those of intellectuals I had never heard of. The way for me to get attention was to have an idea.”

But consider, by contrast, the childhood of the computer scientist Jaron Lanier. His mother died when he was nine and he was raised by an indigent father with an interest in psychic phenomena. For a while they lived in tents in southern New Mexico before moving into a fragile geodesic dome designed by his father. Such an eccentric upbringing might nurture intellectual independence, but it's a long way from the scientific dynasty described by Humphrey or the high-minded but nurturing family in which Gopnik was raised. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux describes an equally unpropitious start. His father was a bull rider in the rodeo and hoped that his only child would emulate him.

Another plausible candidate for later scientific accomplishment is a keen childhood interest in some branch of the natural world: insects, stars, fossils or electricity. Some contributors do display such a passion. Computer scientist Rodney Brooks, for example, was already fascinated by electric circuits at the age of seven. And Lynn Margulis, a biologist, writes of lying on her belly to watch ant colonies. Yet there are disconcerting exceptions. Another biologist, Richard Dawkins, tells an amusing story about mistaking a blue tit for a chaffinch. Shocked at the boy's error, his grandfather turned to Dawkins' father and remonstrated: “Good God, John — is that possible?”

The conclusion that does emerge from this collection is that a huge number of different paths lead to a successful scientific career. Some can be tentatively traced back to early childhood, but others receive a bump start later in life from a mentor or teacher, and many illustrate how chance encounters provoke a dramatic new direction. Without providing any general conclusions, these essays offer the idiosyncrasy and curiosity value that we expect of good, narrative history, combined with much fine writing.

Two contributors — Stephen Pinker and Judith Harris — adopt a scientistic stance toward the whole narrative enterprise. Don't trust our childhood recollections, they caution, and certainly beware of any causal connections that we infer. Psychological research on the unreliability of childhood memories and our frequent lack of introspective access to potent influences on our choices lend weight to their cautionary remarks. But few readers will feel comfortable reading these accounts so sceptically. Many of the contributors revisit their childhood with gusto — and with palpable curiosity. What they write is quirky, absorbing and persuasive in just the way that good stories are.