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Note to new readers: I’ve started this blog in 2010 on Nature blogs (this very post was actually the ‘application post’ to be allowed to blog there). After a while, Nature blogs was cancelled, my blog being transferred to scilogs, which, after a few years, cancelled all non-German language blogs. So I’m now transferring my posts to a site of my own, for now aiming for two posts a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays) [edit: as I notice I am rewriting lots of stuff and am seeking to create a proper introduction first, the tempo may be more like 1 post every 2 weeks for now (writing on July 1st 2017)], mixtures of the best old posts which deserve de-archivation and updating, and new posts. After all, my investigations are still ongoing and insights are still progressing and refining, partly due to the workshops I have since given on the subject and the people I have since met. I hope that this site will one day indeed become part of a network (hence the .net) of people and ideas that helps shape the future of science or even the world. But more importantly, I hope that some of the insights in this blog will give you ideas and inspiration, and help you achieve excellence and happiness in science or in whichever field you choose. 

Tells about: my own history, and why I started investigating science talent and scientific excellence.

When I was about ten years old, on Sunday evenings my father read stories to me and my sister. But those were not stories about dragons or giants, talking animals or wondrous lands; he read the biographies of chemists, from the irascible Paracelsus (“you, who call yourself doctors, are a failed bunch of patented donkeys, who have bought your degrees and consider it a crime if your patients disagree with you”) to the quiet Marie Curie, from the reclusive Cavendish to the politically skillful Lavoisier. That book was the 1931 Dutch version of Bernard Jaffe’s ‘Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry from Ancient Alchemy to Nuclear Fission’, which was, at that time, really following chemistry from ancient history to the present, as Marie Curie was still alive and doing research as the book was being printed.

My father admired those scientists, who pierced the veil of creation. But on me perhaps, the effect was even greater: I dreamt of becoming a truly great chemist. That I too would one day make great discoveries.

Fast forward to eleven years ago. Like many other young chemists, clever or dull, idealistic or realistic, I had had to admit that despite my dreams as a youngster, and despite my excellent results as a student (for example, I did win the Dutch National Chemistry Olympiad) my skill in and enthusiasm for actual chemical research was not at the level necessary to obtain a tenured position at a university, let alone become the greatest chemist of the 21st century. Of course, this was not really a pleasant conclusion for me, however, in the end I accepted that I could never become great in something I did not enjoy (doing cheminformatics research and writing papers) and that, if there was a God or Fate or whatever, its purposes for me may not be as clear as it seemed when first hearing about the adventures of the great chemists of the past.

In a normal case, people get realistic, life goes on, and the dream is stored in a dusty chest in one’s emotional attic, in the hope of never having to be confronted with it again. And such it seemed to be the fate of my dream as well, to be forgotten in my attempts to start leading a normal, well-adjusted life.

Sometimes, however, Fate has a strange sense of humor.

As I said, I didn’t very much like doing chemoinformatics research. However, I loved supervising and teaching and encouraging students. Possibly, this was the influence of my mother, who is a great teacher. So I decided to try out teaching, for which the most obvious choice was teaching at a highschool (simply because Dutch highschools have a chronic shortage of teachers, finding a job would be easy, and would even be valuable experience if one ever wanted to teach at colleges and such – quite some university teachers have started as highschool teachers). As I was aware that people were drawing comparisons between teaching at Dutch highschools and Hell (and listed the comparative advantages of being suspended in pools of boiling sulfur versus teaching Dutch adolescents) I decided to be careful and try an internship first. This internship turned out to be at a very special highschool – namely, one which had special classes to stimulate scientific talent.

Of course, I grew enthusiastic about the possibilities; would it really be possible to teach children to become excellent scientists? But after some further questioning, I realized that the group of uninterested youngsters that had just been apathetically listening to their MP3-players instead of to the chemistry lesson was one of such classes of ‘enthusiastic, talented young people interested in science’. Clearly, if there were a process to stimulate love and skill in science, the school had not quite perfected it yet.

For my internship report (which required me to choose a subject to elaborate upon) I investigated the history of the science classes, and what the teachers did to stimulate science. I soon discovered that the lessons and science programme was not based on any kind of research on stimulating scientific excellence (perhaps the research did not exist), but on common sense. However, common sense was apparently not working very well in this case. So the only way (if it were possible at all!) to make science classes work would be to not rely on common sense, but to take the long and arduous way of trying to find out scientifically what happens in the growth of young scientists, and in which respects excellent scientists differ from mediocre ones.

I will not say that I have all the answers yet. This blog is literally a work in progress, to discuss books, journal articles, newspaper clippings or even things I encounter in my various activities in daily life. Its primary purpose is to share ideas and exchange knowledge with my friends, my former students, and even some family members who have asked to keep updated, even if they are not Dutch nor living in the Netherlands. In the end, I hope it will become a community for information exchange; as I am just one person, and I can only read, think and investigate that much, and even I will sometimes require a fresh perspective of someone else who looks as the same data as I do, and sees new ways to explain phenomena. In the end, this is something that an individual cannot do alone (I am, for example, greatly indebted to authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Coyle, but also to scientists like Dean Keith Simonton and K. Anders Ericsson and many more). And ultimately, I do not think that ‘excellence’ or ‘success’ is something that should just be about oneself (tempting as that goal is). Discovering things we enjoy, and trying to excel in at least some of them, may bring joy in our lives, and benefit the rest of the world.