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== Personal Achievement ==

Although today marks the initiation of my blog, the actual idea of writing was a radio programme in 2001 consisting of interviews with three of that year's Nobel Laureates. As far as I was concerned blogs did not exist then. The laureates were caught on the eve of the award ceremony and were asked to summarise their feelings about the personal acts of creativity that had eventually carried them to Stockholm. They represented that year's judgements on the world's best intellects in economics, medicine and creative writing. Listening to their own stumbling efforts to analyse their life achievements in forging outstanding careers brought up some of my long-standing thoughts on comparative creativity. They were actually crystallised into principles through the lives of these three Nobel prize winners.

The economist represented the principle that important new insights come from crossing institutional barriers. He had graduated as a physicist, and moved into economics with the feeling that if the world is to equilibrate socially, theories are required to include the alleviation of poverty for the practical benefit of most peoples of the world. The medical scientist illustrated the principle that modern science, mainly because of its high costs in equipment and technical know-how, moves forward through teamwork. He was one of several people sharing the prize for medicine; each one had added a brick to the body of knowledge that defines the genes controlling cell division. His achievement also pointed out another truism, that there are no breakthroughs in science driven by the lodestone of bettering the human condition. There is much to do, for example, before his particular discovery can be routed to control human cancer. Viewing science as a corporate activity his work also illustrates the point that 'truth will out'. Individuals matter little in scientific progress. Therefore I will add a subordinate clause to this principle that scientific achievement is a matter of luck. If Alexander Flemming had not discovered penicillin, someone else would have done so round about the same time. There is the scientific certainty that a blueprint, which specifies the design of a medical control system to defeat cancer, actually exists, and we can be confident that one-day it will by revealed and applied. In science the random accidental aspect of 'who comes first' means that with the great speed of modern scientific progress innovators rapidly dissapear into history. I was reminded of this when I turned to a textbook of biochemistry published in 1991. It had this to say about the supervisor of research for my D.Phil. in the late 1950s. 'There are two other common names for the citric acid cycle. One is the Krebs cycle, after Sir Hans Krebs, who first investigated the pathway (work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1953)' Hans Krebs was one of about five researchers who were rapidly gaining evidence to answer one of the central questions of life; how is food turned into energy? He happened to have crossed the tape ahead of the others, but in half a century, he is but a footnote. Actually, my research supervisor put his success as a Laureate down to just being lucky. Significantly he added that it was interesting that the harder he worked the luckier he became. In this same textbook, four pages were devoted to an interview with Sidney Altman, who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1989. The award was for the corporate discovery of how the chemical translation of information about the nucleic acid genetic code could be manipulated by a complementary nucleic acid. Up until that time the only biocatalysts were thought to be proteins. In 1953, nucleic acids were just group of substances found characteristically in the cell nucleus but of totally unknown function. My final principle of creativity emerged from a third laureate, a woman. She was clearly awarded a prize as a writer, but because I tuned into the programme late, I am not sure why she was given a prize. Her reply to the question about the value of her work prompted the succinct reply that there is an intrinsic value in reaching and communicating a new personal understanding. This is my third principle of creativity and it is the stuff of meditation and education, which makes the creativity of artists, writers and musicians, unlike those of scientists, a series of one-off productions. Because there is no natural hidden blueprint to be revealed, their contributions are highly idiosyncratic building blocks for creating wayward cultures for which there are no hidden plans. In this sense, economic creativity has much in common with literary creativity, where opinions loom large in setting signposts and their intellectual pathways to the future. Economic theorists, like all artists, are very much individuals. They all change culture by entering the heads of activists to change or reinforce their mindset, for better or worse.