Science is made up of cliques. Throughout Alex Shneider’s career, he has noticed certain people drawn to certain types of science, and certain types of grant proposals always being funded. Shneider, the founder and CEO of Cure Lab, a vaccine biotech based in Massachusetts, came up with a theory to explain why these cliques occur. At first, it wasn’t too popular.
Shneider concluded that a certain type of scientist is attracted to “first-stage science,” in which new concepts and ideas are introduced to the world. Two examples are James Watson and Francis Crick, who helped initiate modern molecular biology in the middle of the 20th century by describing the double helix of DNA.
By studying the scientists who founded these and other fields, Shneider concluded that first-stage scientists have to be imprecise, untethered by what’s known at the time, and—sometimes—even inaccurate. Other ...
