In recent years, professionals have debated and advocated for incorporating creativity into study programs for scientists-in-training. This effort seeks to encourage future scientists’ originality, multidisciplinary thinking, and problem-solving abilities.
Professor Dr. Martin Lercher of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and his colleague Professor Dr. Itai Yanai of New York University (NYU) are working on the theme of creativity in research. They advise teaching the value of creative processes for scientific growth in graduate study programs in the most recent editorial in the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology.
The rate of scientific innovation appears to be slowing, according to the authors: the proportion of research efforts that push science in new directions by breaking with existing thinking has declined since the second half of the twentieth century.
Such efforts have given way to more results-oriented approaches that advance research but rarely result in breakthrough science. This reflects a fundamental shift: hypothesis-driven methodologies dominate publicly financed research initiatives, which tend to validate ideas rather than seek really novel and unexpected discoveries.
“Day science” refers to modern science as a systematic, well-planned process guided by hypotheses developed in advance, while “night science” is the non-systematic, creative part of science, namely free thinking and the often intuitive exploration of ideas.
François Jacob
Professor Martin Lercher of HHU’s Computational Cell Biology research group and Professor Itai Yanai of NYU’s Applied Bioinformatics Laboratories believe that there is a need to rethink how scientists-in-training are educated. They argue that “graduate study programs should renew an emphasis on creativity by teaching the tools of innovative thinking.”
The two authors have been calling for the “promotion of the creative side of the scientific process” for years. Their approach draws on the concept of “day science” and “night science” developed by the Nobel Prize winner François Jacob: “Day science” refers to modern science as a systematic, well-planned process guided by hypotheses developed in advance, while “night science” is the non-systematic, creative part of science, namely free thinking and the often intuitive exploration of ideas.
Lercher: “The first thing scientists-in-training learn today is how to establish a foothold in the world of research through the definition of highly specific projects, which lead to predictable results, which in turn lead to citable publications. Knowing and practising this is of course important as it enables incremental advances in research areas and the provision of reliable answers to detailed questions.” Yanai adds: “Yet, we cannot see this as the be-all and end-all, as this structured process rarely results in new discoveries, which are however critical for the advancement of science.”
The two writers of Nature Biotechnology advocate for the inclusion of scientific creativity courses in graduate study programs’ curricula. Improvisational, open scientific talks, both with close colleagues and with experts in relevant domains, may be the most potent tool for creative science. Graduate students and postdoctoral associates might learn to pose new ideas from diverse viewpoints by getting insight into the creativity toolkit of other fields. According to Lercher and Yanai, “inventing the right question can advance science more than answering an existing one.”
Finally, the authors emphasise in their editorial that placing an emphasis on creativity in the sciences would also help to reduce misconceptions among the public about the scientific process, encouraging increased numbers of creative young people to pursue a career in science.
