The Creative Process in Science and Medicine ed. by Hans A. Krebs and Julian H. Shelley (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Creative Process in Science and Medicine. International Congress Series no. 355. Edited by Hans A. Krebs and Julian H. Shelley. Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica, 1975. Pp. 138. $21.75. This slim volume contains the proceedings of the C. H. Boehringer Solin Symposium, held in four sessions at Kronberg, Taurus, May 16 and 17, 1974. The participants exemplify the topic they discuss: the creative process in science and medicine. Many of them are distinguished for their creative contributions to the biological sciences, and with proper modesty they are able to refer to their own experience in solving difficult problems or carrying out systematic programs of research over a long period of time. The format of the symposium was appropriately structured, allowing spontaneous, wide-ranging, ad lib discussion in which the participants were clearly advancing the question as the conversation flowed on. In spite of these pluses, the symposium was a disappointment to this reviewer. The participants displayed little if any familiarity with the extensive psychological literature dealing with creativity, and in fact psychology as a discipline was not represented (though psychoanalysis was). Julian Shelley in his introduction quotesJ. P. Guilford's view that "a searching, analytical basic study of intellectual resources will eventually pay off in connection with the understanding of creative scientific talent" and notes his attempt to draw up theoretical models for the structure of intellect. But then Shelley adds, "Although this was not discussed here, I suspect that this approach would not find a great deal of sympathy with the participants of this meeting." My own guess, however, is that the participants were merely uniformed, not only about Guilford's work but about the entire body of recent thinking and research on the topic. But to return to the virtues of the symposium. The personal recollections of moments of discovery, and the accounts of personal philosophy and motivation which led to engagement with significant problems in biology and medicine, are fascinating and most valuable. The participants include so many distinguished figures that any occasion which got them to talking with one another aboutjust about anything would be worth recording, and their talk about creativity is an interesting addition to the literature of the subject. As one might expect, they do manage to touch upon many of the characteristics of creative people that systematic research has revealed and confirmed. Jacques Monod emphasizes what he calls "technical courage," "good taste," and "subjective simulation." This latter is very close to the method of empathy, followed by personal fantasy and biological analogy, employed in synectics; good taste is the appreciation and cultivation of the possibility of elegance, which in turn is related to the conservation of symmetry; and technical courage is freePerspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1976 | 157 dorn from the fear of failure in risky innovations. Finally, Monod mentioned paying attention to oddities, to "the strange little things that happen in experiments ." All these observations will be familiar to readers who are conversant with the psychological literature on creativity. Other characteristics cited by these creative scientists are: rebelliousness (Sir Karl Popper), being lucky (David Davies), independence (Nikolaas Tinbergen), openness to the irrational (Gerhard Thews), and complexity (Manfred Eigen). These are precisely the variables that have most concerned us in the University of California Studies of creative scientists, architects, writers, and painters. I once summarized our findings with creative young scientists in this brief listing of characteristics: (1) superior measured intelligence; (2) unusually unyielding independence ofjudgment and resistance to basically unsound opinions which had won the endorsement of their peers; (3) strong need for order and for perceptual closure, combined with a resistance to premature closure and an interest in which may appear as contradictions, disorder, and imbalance, or at least a very complex balance whose ordering principle is not immediately apparent ; (4) an appreciation of the intuitive and nonrational; and (5) a profound commitment to the search for aesthetic and philosophical meaning. But the symposium did not limit itself to a survey of the characteristics of creative scientists. The situational context is given its due in a discussion of cultural evolution and the role of individual creativity in advancing community development. Brian Magee emphasized interdependence and the limitations...