A Tale of Two Nobel Laureates

My Harvard colleague and 2007 Nobel laureate in Economics, Eric Maskin, invited me last night to dinner in the company of the 2017 Nobel Laureate in molecular biology, Michael Rosbash. As soon as the three of us sat down, Michael said: “The discovery of recombinant DNA changes everything in my field. What are the equivalent transformative discoveries in your fields of research?”. “This is an easy choice in my field,” I noted, and encouraged Eric to answer first. Eric suggested game theory in Economics, pioneered by John von Neumann’s paper on the desired strategy in a zero-sum game of two players. This strategy has been helpful in optimizing the outcome of military conflicts.

Michael reasoned that even when we are engaged in unlimited frontiers, scientific exploration is not always beneficial for the practitioners, especially when dealing with discoveries that are not popular at their time, like plate tectonics. The paradigm shift proposed by Alfred Wegener encountered fierce opposition for 50 years from distinguished scientists of the time, such as Harold Jeffreys and Charles Schuchert, who were outspoken critics of continental drift. Such opposition stems from the tendency of scholars to dismiss data that deviates from their past belief system.

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