The myth of the lone genius
Popular histories of science are crowded with solitary heroes. Newton beneath his apple tree, Darwin on the deck of the Beagle, Marie Curie stirring tonnes of ore in a leaking shed: these images are so familiar that they have come to define what a scientific breakthrough looks like. A single exceptional mind, working largely alone, sees what everyone else has missed. The story appears in children's books, museum displays and film biographies, and it still shapes how many people imagine scientific work. It is a compelling story. It is also, for the most part, misleading.
This is not to deny that individuals matter. Some people are unusually gifted, and some discoveries would plainly have been delayed without them. But the heroic narrative tends to edit out everything that made those individuals productive: the correspondents who supplied data, the instrument makers whose devices made new measurements possible, the assistants whose names appear nowhere in the textbooks. Darwin, for instance, relied on a vast network of breeders, collectors and naturalists, exchanging thousands of letters over several decades. Marie Curie, similarly, worked in close partnership with her husband, Pierre, and depended on waste ore donated from a mine in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary, for her raw material. To describe either scientist's work as the product of one person's solitary reflection is not so much wrong as radically incomplete.
There is also the awkward matter of simultaneous discovery. Calculus was developed independently by Newton and Leibniz; the theory of evolution by natural selection occurred to Alfred Russel Wallace while Darwin was still preparing his own account for publication; oxygen was isolated by at least two chemists working separately within a few years of each other. Historians have catalogued dozens of such cases, and each drew on instruments, data and theories that had been accumulating for decades. If great ideas depended entirely on rare individual genius, we would expect them to appear at random. The fact that they so often emerge in several places at once suggests that, by a certain point, the necessary pieces were already lying on the table, waiting to be assembled.
Why, then, does the myth persist? Part of the answer is simply that stories need protagonists; a narrative about gradual, distributed progress makes for a poor film. Journalism plays its part too: a single named discoverer is far easier to photograph, interview and quote than a team of three hundred. But institutions have their own reasons for preserving it. Prizes are awarded to named individuals, rarely to more than a few people at once, and funding bodies are understandably drawn to 'star' researchers who seem to guarantee results. The outcome is a system that rewards the appearance of solitary brilliance even as the actual work of science becomes ever more collaborative: papers in some fields now list hundreds, occasionally thousands, of authors.
None of this means we should stop celebrating remarkable scientists. It does mean, however, that the stories we tell about them shape who believes they can take part. Studies in which children are asked to draw a scientist have repeatedly found that many produce the same stereotyped figure: a man in a white coat, working in a laboratory. A teenager who thinks discovery requires a once-in-a-generation intellect may never consider a research career; one who understands it as a collective, cumulative enterprise might reasonably conclude that there is room for her too.