The New Yorker has an article out today by Malcolm Gladwell called Late Bloomers and subtitled, Why do we equate genius with precocity?

This reminds me of a long-standing thread on the Scientific Advisory Board .

It occurs to me once more (as it does periodically) that we scientists are in fact artists. That we need patrons.

As Gladwell wrote,

If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level. (…) This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.[

What scientist with a freshly-minted Ph.D. knows in exactly what area s/he will be working a few years before retirement, thirty or forty years on ? Gladwell’s point is that many artists’ (and I contend, scientists’) best work happens later in their careers. And they need to live and be supported in their explorations and evolution, or they will not produce the later masterpieces.

Quick, who wrote this?

Now it seems to me that I see better and that I think more correctly about the direction of my studies. Will I ever attain the end for which I have striven so much and so long? I hope so, but as long as it is not attained a vague state of uneasiness persists which will not disappear until I have reached port, that is until I have realized something which develops better than in the past, and can thereby prove the theories— which in themselves are always easy; it is giving proof of what one thinks that raises serious obstacles. So I continue to study.

We scientists are often also “experimental innovators” – much like the late-blooming author or visual artist. Gladwell quotes David Galenson’s “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” in which he writes (and offers the answer to the quote above),

The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Gladwell reminds us:

Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?

I can’t help but think of this in the ongoing context of the cut-throat search for academic positions in which one could potentially be safe to pursue creative ideas. The current system for providing a tenured spot is selecting for young geniuses, perhaps to the detriment of the late bloomers.

However, the ones that do make it are then highly eligible for those Nobel prizes, many of which are given for the achievements of a lifetime . By that point, the old experimenters can catch up with the young geniuses.