Purposive Drift

Popping up like Puck

Max Perutz knew a thing or two about creating the circumstances where future Nobel prize winners would thrive:

".. creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organised. It arises spontaneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organisation, inflexible, bureaucratic rules, and mountains of futile paperwork can kill it. Discoveries cannot be planned; they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected places."

(Thanks to the book review in the Observer Review that got me looking me for the source of this quote.)