| I am reminded of the more general problem faced by any intelligent and aspiring individual in this day and age: to make a name for yourself, to
discover something interesting, you not only have to make use of everything that your forebears discovered, but you have to find something noteworthy
that the long line of intellectual explorers preceding you MISSED. You can't just match them. The world doesn't need a third discoverer of
calculus. Newton and Leibnitz will forever get the credit, whether or not you come up with their principles on your own. You have to be beyond Newton
and Leibnitz to be a math genius. You have to be better than Davy, Pasteur, Liebig, and Lavoisier to be a giant of chemistry. But let's not kid
ourselves. Very few of the researchers currently publishing are the modern equivalent of Berzelius. The only reason they are able to publish anything
is that they keep plumbing the depths of minutiae. They end up writing articles like "Significant Enhancement of Electron Transfer Reduction of
NAD+ Analogues by Complexation with Scandium Ion and the Detection of the Radical Intermediate-Scandium Ion Complex." If you'd been born
half a dozen generations earlier you might be the DISCOVERER of scandium, and have at least a chance of later generations remembering you. But the
earlier generations grabbed all the glory and you're left picking through the crumbs until a new frontier opens up. We have the richest selection
of refined knowledge and the poorest selection of new areas for exploration at any time in history - "we" in my definition including
everybody who has an interest in chemistry but but less than a six-figure budget and no desire to join the Annals of Irrelevance writing about the
mechanism of yet another obscure reaction. |
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