Over the Hill

In 1905, his Annus mirabilis, Albert Einstein published five papers, each of which laid foundations for the next century of physics. One of the papers described special relativity. He was twenty-six years old at the time.

Rosalind Franklin was an X-ray crystallographer who did the experiments that allowed Watson and Crick to publish their famous structure of DNA in 1953. She did the experiments in her late 20's.

Évariste Galois originator of many important modern mathematical ideas such as group theory, died at age 20.

In the Manhattan project- the federal government project that moved from concept to working atomic bomb in about the time it now takes to get a PhD- the average age of a participating scientist was 29 years old.

I see a pattern here and a lesson for all the thirty-something postdocs out there: if you haven't had your blockbuster Nobel-prize-worthy idea by now, chances are you never will. I'm not saying you can't continue doing wonderful, creative things - things that younger people couldn't dream of doing - into your 40's, your 50's, or your 80's. I am saying that making a great fundamental stride in science probably isn't one of those things.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right, then our academic system does not reflect this reality. These days, scientists (at least in my field) are still considered "in training" well into their 30's, when it may very well be that natural peak performance time, at least as far as scientific imagination is concerned, is in one's 20's, and that the appropriate time for training is in grade school, not grad school. It would be as if, to join the Olympics, you had to go through training until you were 35, waiting in line behind all the athletes coming before you. The athletes seem to have learned how to adapt to this reality. They recognize that there's a peak period in life for the kind of performance they're looking for, and they have designed the career around the reality. There's a place for older athletes too, just not at center court any more; instead, they coach, they commentate, they go on TV to sell cars and razor blades. Can't scientists do the same? Can't we recognize that in some things, age does matter? Let's have a place for our middle-aged and older scientists that recognizes their increased maturity and wisdom. But is it realistic to have them submitting application after application to funding agencies, saying that they're on the cusp of a revolutionary new idea?