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"You remember that great Einstein quote?" asks Deborah Blum. "About genius being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration?"

We're talking about creativity in science. Blum is speaking over the phone from her home in Madison, where she is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin. A former president of the National Association of Science Writers, she is a Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of several books, including Monkey Wars and the recent Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death.

"If you look at careers in science," she says, "it's really like the one lightning strike. And they never do anything as brilliant as that again." In part this is because a scientist may work for decades to prove a point. Even a scientist lucky enough to be dazzled by insight and inspiration more than once would still have to devote a great deal of time to confirming (or refuting) her brilliant ideas. "But the really famous scientists—we know them for the one flash of inspiration."

Blum argues that the same policy applies to the rest of intellectual
and artistic endeavor. "You can have a brilliant insight into how to do
a painting, or you can have a melody float through your head, or an
idea for how to tell a story—and your brilliant idea still has to be
laboriously written out." On the phone I can hear Blum take a deep
breath as she thinks about these topics, which she says never cease to fascinate her. "The very methodology of science, the framework of
science—the requirements for how you work your idea—kills a lot of
creativity." To make a leap of imagination requires strength and
commitment.

We talk for a while about Charles Darwin's insights into the way that
nature changes slowly over time, and how he spent decades documenting this radical notion with evidence before publishing the Origin of Species. "Or take Marie and Pierre Curie, and their work with radioactive elements. Or radio. Or the electron." Blum says that a classic one-time insight was the discovery of the double helix in the 1950s and the realization of its significance in deciphering heredity. "For James Watson, the moment of realization about the double helix was his eureka moment; after that, he never did a piece of brilliant science again."

One of Blum's favorite examples of the scientific imagination running
wild is the early years of prehistory research, just prior to Darwin's
era. Scientists—many of them inspired amateurs—were digging up giant bones and trying to reconstruct the monsters that inhabited Earth in the distant past. When people are working in a field that is still young and ignorant, "it allows you to go out with some really wild ideas. They're finding these bones and then imaginatively assembling them, and some of the combinations are hysterically funny from our point of view." Blum laughs. "It's all in a sense leaps of imagination. And the thing about creativity is that you can be spectacularly wrong or—if you're willing to take the chance—spectacularly right."

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