These three Nobel Prize winners tell us about the science of success in Dubai

Three Nobel Prize winners tell us about the keys to their scientific success – curiosity, passion and perseverance.

Kurt Wüthrich, a professor of structural biology at Scripps Research Institute in California and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. Reem Mohammed / The National

Three of the world’s leading scientific minds were in Dubai last week to extol the wonders of creativity and innovation. Run as part of the Nobel Prize Series of events, supported by the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, the trio – American astrophysicist George Smoot, his compatriot and scientist Martin Chalfie and Swiss chemist Kurt Wüthrich – were full of wisdom and humour as they laid bare the virtues of academic pursuit and the keys to successful science.

Smoot, the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, said he never entered the field to win accolades. It’s the excitement of new discoveries that keeps him going.

“I wanted to know about the universe, about where we came from,” he said. “There’s a certain thrill that I get as a person from learning about the universe, whether I personally did it or if some of my colleagues did, it’s just a thrill to see that kind of progress.”

Wüthrich, winner of the 2002 chemistry prize, said his first major failure was not winning a medal in the Olympics.

“I started to study my blood, because I thought that this was the cause of my failure to make it to the Olympics, which turned out to make me a well-known scientist within less than two years,” he recalls. The success bred more setbacks when he failed in devising an effective technology to study proteins. However, this caused Wüthrich to write a monograph in 1975, which “opened my eyes to what we had to do”. This research led him down the path to further discoveries, and his consequent Nobel Prize.

Chalfie, shared his 2008 chemistry prize with Japanese organic chemist Osamu Shimomura. “In 1945, [Shimomura] was told he had to quit high school and start working in a paint factory. It turned out to be a very good thing for him to do, not because it disrupted his education, but because the city he was in was Nagasaki.” Chalfie described how the unexpected move to the factory outside the city protected Shimomura from devastating effect of the atom bomb.

Years later, Shimomura spent a whole summer trying to discover why a particular jellyfish produced light. After rounding up plenty of failed experiments, he threw his fish samples into the sink and walked off, turning off the light. “And he looks back at the sink and he sees the sink is glowing,” Chalfie said. This experience triggered the realisation the calcium in seawater was what allowed the production of light.

Wüthrich grew up on a farm, where, at a young age, he managed a trout river. Flicking to a slide in his presentation depicting him as a young adult, holding an enormous fish: “What I learnt at a very early age is that you have to catch a big fish to attract attention.”

“Once you have a big fish,” he said, smiling, moving to the next slide, “then you go to Stockholm and you get the handshake from the king.”

Smoot said successful innovators usually worked in teams of four or five.

“There’s some creative disagreement in the group. If they are all exactly the same, nothing they do is creative – they just make whatever they think they can make,” he said. “But, if there’s tension in the group, that’s what they do and that’s where the learning process is.”

Chalfie praised the role universities play in supporting research.

“My university does not know what I do – they just want me to do something,” he said. “But they support me in that, and that’s very important – that I have the freedom to do the research that I want to do. Grant support is also very important, because it’s not a contract. Nobody tells me I have to ask for money to do specific things, but that the project itself is important. I justify the project and then it’s assumed that I’m not going to slavishly do what I said I was going to do, I’m going to do what’s best for science.”