Creative minds

Creative minds

www.nobelmuseum.se/zino.aspx?articleID=14868
Cultures of Creativity, an exhibition, at Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, Bangalore, India
The exhibition has visited Oslo, Tokyo, Seoul, Houston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, Florence, and London and will continue to Singapore and finally Dubai.

Rating: ****

What inspires people to think and act creatively? How much of creativity is nature, and how much is nurture? How does environment affect thought processes, particularly in cutting edge science? Indeed, what exactly is creativity? These are questions that the exhibition Cultures of Creativity considered.

The exhibition, which began touring in 2001 to celebrate the centennial of the Nobel prize, has been organised by the Nobel Foundation. It tells us about the life of Alfred Nobel and his gift to humanity - the Nobel prize - arguably the greatest honour in science.

The exhibits included replicas of Nobel prize medals, diplomas, newspapers, as well as real instruments from the laboratories of laureates and more. Nobel, we learn, loved books and writing and even thought of becoming an author before he turned inventor.

The outstanding exhibits included an ear of maize from those worked on by Barbara McClintock, who discovered transposons or "jumping genes"; a Petri dish in which Alexander Fleming grew penicillin in hands; a flask that Peyton Rous, who worked on the sarcoma virus that now bears his name, used in the 1930s; and the chambers that Roger Sperry used to study monkey brains. More artefacts seemed to relate to physiology or medicine than to physics, chemistry, economics, or peace - but, perhaps my interests biased my view. At any rate, Nobel would not have minded - apparently, he felt that the prize for medicine was more important than the others.

A newspaper headline screams that Frederick Banting won the 1923 prize, and the article quotes him as saying that he was not working on a serum to combat pernicious anaemia and "ever since the report got around, I have been having letters, telegrams and messages of all sorts. The greatest service people could do is to leave us alone to work." He also regrets that Charles Best has been excluded from the award. A 1997 New York Times article has Stanley Prusiner, the man behind prions, stating, "Skepticism in science is important." Among the non-scientific exhibits, the crockery used during a 1991 dinner and ceremonies were also on display.

Posters displayed key words surrounding creativity. The one pertaining to individuals read, "Disrespect, chance, innovative, competence, creative, questioning, persistence, courage." The poster on the creative milieu read, "Contacts, diversity, combine, work, meetings, networks, communication, chaos."

The movies offer much as well. Santiniketan, Basel Institute for immunology, Cold Spring Harbor are among the eight institutions covered.

There were 32 films on people, including Barbara McClintock as she walks through maize fields while talking about how she benefited from the warm relationships with her colleagues. Over a beer in The Eagle pub, Cambridge, Francis Crick explains with James Watson how they chose the right problem at the right time and benefited from being candid with each other to the point of being rude. And Max Perutz, the molecular biologist who studied haemoglobin, grins and states that he submitted a paper to Nature and went off for a skiing holiday - only to come back and find out he was famous.

Computers provided an online link to the website of the Nobel Foundation (www.nobelprize.org), which is abundant in information and worth a visit. I already knew that Peyton Rous was the oldest person to be awarded the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, in 1966, when he was 86 years old. But who was the youngest? Frederick Banting, it turns out, was just 32 years old in 1923.

Of the various families who worked on a problem and shared the prize, Carl and Gerty Cori were the only husband and wife pair (in 1947) for their work on the discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen. Remarkably, the only brothers to have won a Nobel prize were not collaborators - they did not even work in the same field. Nikolaas Tinbergen, who tutored Richard Dawkins, the well known writer, won a medicine Nobel for his work on the science of animal behaviour in 1973, but his brother, Jan, had won it in economics in 1969 - proof, perhaps, for the nature hypothesis of genius. Trivia buffs will be amused to learn that the menu for the annual dinner is kept secret until 7 pm on 10 December, the day the prize is awarded, and the dessert is always the same - ice cream.

A cosy chamber to study monkey brains

"Why was Bangalore chosen, out of so many Indian cities?" I asked K V Bhatta, the director of the museum. He explained that as a city which had many research centres, including the Indian Institute of Science and the Raman Research Institute, it was the right choice. The museum has a floor earmarked for visiting exhibits.

Many appropriate quotes by Nobel laureates as well as others adorn the walls. Arthur Koestler's "Creativity in science can be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five" and Louis Pasteur's "I don't believe there would be any science without intuition" are good take home messages. I wonder how many Nobel prizes Pasteur would have won if it had existed in his time.

Competing interests: None declared.

Sanjay A Pai, consultant pathologist and head, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Manipal Hospital, Airport Road, Bangalore 560017
Email: s_pai@vsnl.com


studentBMJ 2006;14:309-352 September ISSN 0966-6494