In praise of egalitarianism
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010227
Last October Nature published a commentary by William Bynum, an emeritus professor of the history of medicine at University College London. The commentary was occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the announcement that two pairs of researchers from Cambridge University’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB)—Francis Crick and James Watson; John Kendrew and Max Perutz—were to receive Nobel prizes.
So far, nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 13 of the LMB’s staff scientists and a further eight Nobels to researchers who worked or trained there temporarily. “What makes a great lab?” was Bynum’s topic and title.
John Kendrew (left) and Max Perutz (right) shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the structure of myoglobin and other globular proteins.
To answer his question, Bynum looked back at other successful labs, including those of the chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–73), physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), and geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945). Among the factors of success that Bynum identified, one was particularly strong at the LMB: its egalitarianism, which existed not just within individual research groups, but which also pervaded the whole institution.
Perutz was the LMB’s first leader, but he wasn’t its director. He eschewed the title because it would have entailed giving up his experiments when he stepped down. Nor did he want to be an administrator. To quote Bynum:
Instead, the lab had a loose management committee, which met occasionally and saw its main job as attracting outstanding talent to the lab. Perutz kept the bureaucratic structures of the laboratory minimalist, and until 1973 a single administrator, Audrey Martin (and her dog Slippers), looked after things.
As if to echo Bynum’s words and Perutz’s policy, a former employee of Bell Labs emailed me about last week’s Dayside blog post . The topic of the post was a prescient 1977 paper by seven Bell Labs researchers about the future impact of computers on science.
My correspondent pointed out something significant about the paper’s author list that most readers would not have recognized:
Most interesting is the identification of all of the authors as “members of the technical staff” (MTS). Bell Labs was a level organization in terms of identifying technical contributions: All professionals, largely with PhDs, were MTS. Several of the authors in fact did have management titles; one was the president of the Labs, others were directors of areas with several departments, and others were department heads. But all preferred to be seen as MTS! It was a great environment!
Such egalitarianism isn’t always appropriate. If a lab’s mission is to build, say, a massive neutrino detector or a planet-hunting space probe, robust structures and policies for managing people and projects need to be in place to keep the mission on track.
But if a lab wants to promote the exchange of ideas, to foment collaboration, to give researchers—young, old, and in between—an equal shot at resources, if a lab wants to minimize bureaucracy, then the egalitarianism of the LMB or Bell Labs in its heyday is worth emulating.