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Rabbits' feet and four-leaf clovers

2010; The Company of Biologists; Volume: 123; Issue: 16 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1242/jcs.077487

1477-9137

mole,

Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research

Read'em and weep, my friends. Full house and on the 'flop', no less. So come to Papa. It really looks like this is my night. I'm out with the gang, playing poker at lovely Professor Lioness' den (she is usually in the money, but tonight I'm winning big). Lucky me. Oh, I just love to win. Of course, I don't gloat or rub it in, or maybe I do, just a little. He, he, he.Let's sit the next one out and talk about luck a little. Funny thing, really. Most societies have a concept of luck, although there are exceptions. Buddhism and Islam, in particular, don't have it at all, so it might be the case that most people on the planet don't believe in it. (On the other hand, Hindus have a goddess of luck, and in Japan there are no less then seven lucky gods and lots of good luck symbols.) Moles, by the way, believe in luck and four-leaf clovers are rather yummy. But we're friends with rabbits, as we're both confused with rodents (as you know, I am a talpid, in the order Soricomorpha – what you might call an insectivore), so rabbits' feet are only lucky if they are still on the lagomorph. But it's really pretty easy to see what this is about: having a bit of control over the random things in life.But that isn't what I wanted to talk about, really. I wanted to talk about luck in this thing we do, this science thing. And especially in biomedical research. You've got to be very lucky to make a go of this and for some good reasons. We've talked about this before: biology isn't logical. We living things are pieced together from bits and pieces of historical accident, selected over eons of time, and the more we learn about the process, the more it seems to be a process of dumb luck rather than any sort of engineering. Darwin perceived a world in which the processes of evolution gave rise to wonderful complexity and many of us still think this way: building with simple and elegant solutions to biological problems to make watches we find on the beach. But we've come to understand that random fluctuations in populations can fix traits that are not particularly elegant and we are stuck with all sorts of weirdly improbable paraphernalia in our evolutionary toolboxes. And that's what makes biology so hard. No matter how much we reason that things must work a particular way, our experiments tell us that it just ain't so, and many of us fabricate elaborate fantasies to explain why the bizarre ways we're put together are actually for the best. But they're just fantasies. We can sometimes figure out how it is (sometimes), but we often expect to also understand why (or are expected to by our colleagues who review our grants and papers). But even the how is elusive, as we try to find out the answers to questions that seemed pretty straightforward when we started.And more often than not, we fail. Not just a little, we fail big. And as a consequence, we toil and toil and the next publication on which our livelihood depends becomes a goal that fades into the shadowy future. Frustration, ruination and despair. So, what do we do? How can we just get lucky?I confess that I'm a teeny bit superstitious. It's something I got from my dear mother (the one who said, "if you're so famous, how come I've never heard of you?"). I touch wood when I say that our grant looks really nice, and I once bought a Darma doll in Japan (where they have many wonderful 'good-luck charms') and colored in one eye while wishing that our paper would get into a journal with shiny pages (the tradition, if you don't know, says that you color in the other eye when you get your wish – the two-eyed doll is on the shelf in my office). I hate to 'jinx' things by saying an experiment is going to work and I spit in my hat when someone says 'jinx' (okay, I don't do that). But none of these are in any way the secret of what bits of success I have. At least, I don't think so. What do we do to be successful?What we do is ask those who have succeeded. Because if we look around, we see these scientists who somehow get it right, not just once, but time and again. They give the keynote talks at our meetings and visit us on their world tours. They regale us with stories of how they started with yet another simple observation and elegantly pursued it until another beautiful, shining truth emerged. They are so lucky and it isn't at all fair. But maybe they have some simple secret that has eluded us, so if they can teach us what it is that they do, we can be lucky, too.Of course, it isn't only these prizewinners we ask. In every lab or department, there seem to be a select few who just get things to work, publish papers and get grants. Some of them work harder than we do, so maybe that's the answer? But then, a lot of us work very hard for very long, but seemingly without the luck that makes it productive. Or worse, we get answers, but they aren't very interesting, so we go do more work. And meanwhile, Lucky Luciano gets another paper in a journal with nice, soft pages. And Lucky doesn't even seem to work so very hard as all that. He even seems to be having a good time (and we just hate him).But what if it's just luck? That would be awful, but it's something I worry about. But imagine if we could make a living calling 'heads or tails' on a coin toss, provided we're right. Most of us are simply wrong half the time and, no matter how much we practice, we can't get above this average. But there are some who do better than fifty percent and even a very few who seem to be right all the time. So we ask them what their secret is, their method. And if they're honest, they'll tell you: I just guess. They are successful, but there's no reason (and we just hate them).But this probably isn't the answer. There are people who make their livelihoods gambling, playing poker, betting horses or investing in the stock market. Yes, they could just be lucky (like our coin tossers), but a bit of calculation tells us that this isn't the case. They have figured out how to make the odds go a bit in their favor, and with their skills and perseverance they come out on top. Yes, luck figures in, but the skills make the difference.Then there's the politics idea. People who are successful have figured out how to game the system. When they submit a paper or a grant, the reviewers have somehow been hand picked to give them a pass, and the more they publish, the more power they amass to game the system even more. They use their power to steal the good ideas, buy the latest technology and generate model systems they can exploit to their continued advantage. It's all a sham and it's not fair (and we just hate them).But this isn't the answer either. Because in every case, these successful folks started out small and, if we follow their careers, they published lots of small observations (and a handful of big ones) and with time they just seem to have gotten better. The review process is anonymous and, if you ask them, they get a lot of malicious sniping just because they're so successful (and because we hate them). But they keep being successful. Yes, they have access to resources we don't have, but they earned it and they got those resources precisely because they continue to use them well. Okay, not all of them – once someone like this loses focus, or gets lazy, they come down fast (although perhaps not fast enough for many of us), but you can't game the system enough to make you lucky. It's like 'celebrity' poker – those games that are on the wasteland cable TV channels: 'celebrities' get on the show because they've got some sort of name recognition (they had a small part in a long-running cop drama) and their agent got them the gig, but some of them win again and again. They don't have the juice to fix the deck (I think) and the cards fall as they will, but if they keep winning, they get paid and come back again. And some of them win a lot and it has nothing to do with their celebrity (such as it is).Okay, I confess. I seem to be one of the lucky ones. I give keynote lectures and go on world tours, and I seem to publish more than my fair share in glossy journals. And I've been thinking a lot about what my secret might be and, the fact is, I'm not sure. But I'll try to figure it out if you'll bear with me. But it's my deal and I've got a game to win. Your bet. See you at the next break.