The Company Science Keeps

A personal field guide to curiosity, ambition, and the people behind discovery

By Rafeed Alkawadri

A personal reflection on twenty years in academic medicine. These are my recollections; the overlapping portraits include me. They are not a scientific classification or a key to particular colleagues or institutions. The original, sometimes blunt names appear in brackets; they are figurative, not diagnoses.

Creativity remains elusive. It resists confinement, yet without restraints it can become meaningless. An idea needs freedom, and something to answer to: a question, an observation, a reality that will not bend to our wishes. That paradox fascinates me. This essay is not a review of the substantial literature on creativity and its constraints. It is about the people who keep trying.

In April 2019, I was driving when the breaking-news alerts began. I had not yet learned to switch off notifications. CNN, NPR, Fox News, the BBC—the story arrived from every direction. Scientists had restored certain functions in isolated brains hours after death. My first thought was:

Who the hell had stolen our thunder?

We had worked on that experiment for roughly four years. In my mind, it was still under consideration at Nature; events had overtaken that picture. Then I read on. The news was ours.

I was overjoyed.

There is something extraordinary about having your own work visit you from the outside. You know its uncertainties, technical difficulties, and years within a small circle. Then it comes through the world's front door and you meet it almost as a stranger. I was thrilled by what we had helped make possible, and humbled to have been part of it. It remains one of the great honors of my scientific life.

The BrainEx study in Nature restored microcirculation and certain molecular and cellular functions in isolated brains, with experimental perfusion beginning four hours after death. I did not conceive the experiment. I performed and analyzed the electrocorticography studies, recording electrical activity from the brain's surface. No organized global electrical activity associated with awareness was observed. Cellular recovery did not mean restored consciousness.

A few days later, I sent the paper to senior colleagues:

hope u guys enjoy coz this was never done b4.

Happy holidays to all.

Apparently, conventional spelling had not survived the excitement.

I value that email as a record of a very happy moment. The episode is also a small case study in what draws me to science: the long uncertainty, the chance to contribute, and the sudden pleasure of seeing a new possibility become real.

Why give so much of a life to this work? Why surrender an easy evening at home, or a better-paid job? There are immediate rewards and distant ones: understanding, recognition, impact, the hope of making a dent. Some discoveries arrive before anyone knows how to receive them; others prove less important than we hoped. The rewards may come late or never. Yet people keep coming—to serve, understand, win, belong, make something beautiful. Most want several things at once.

Over twenty years, the company science keeps has fascinated me. Others have sketched its temperaments before, and proposed different kinds of scientist for different stages of a field. These are my informal portraits, drawn with affection, amusement, and occasional exasperation. I recognize parts of myself throughout.

The Explorer [The Curious] is led by a question that will not behave. An observation sits awkwardly inside the accepted explanation. A boundary looks less permanent from close up. Curiosity begins as an irritation and eventually acquires equipment, collaborators, and a budget.

At its most intense, this becomes the Absorbed Visionary [The “Psychotic” / Crazy One]. The name is deliberately extravagant; I mean the absorption. Thinking deeply about an idea not attempted before, I have sometimes felt the ordinary distance between myself and the problem disappear. Some of my most successful work has accompanied such periods. At times, I truly felt that nature was communicating with me—the universe, even the distant planets joining a private conversation.

That felt connection is one of the private pleasures of science. The idea must still endure controls, contrary observations, and another person's attempt to make it work.

“Here's to the crazy ones.” The phrase associated with Steve Jobs captures something of that spirit. The Synthesizer [The Steve Jobs Type] finds originality between territories. A clinical problem meets a mathematical technique. A tool answers a question its designers never considered. Familiar, even dull parts come together to make something beautiful and useful.

This requires learning the difficult parts on both sides of a field's border. The ingredients may be recognizable; the achievement is their relationship. We do not dismiss a composition because its notes already existed.

The Disruptor [The Rebel / Troublemaker] questions the premise everyone else has accepted. Ideas arrive untidily, with more energy than organization and more possibilities than any sensible laboratory could pursue.

Most go nowhere. Occasionally, one is off the chart. The stream that produced a dozen unusable ideas may produce the masterpiece that changes what the rest of us think to ask. I have considerable sympathy for that unevenness. A research career need not resemble a row of identical houses. The rebel still has to listen when the evidence goes the other way.

The Transmuter [The Alchemist] pursues two of humanity's oldest ambitions: creating money out of nothing and preventing death. Today's tools are artificial intelligence, genomics, and computing on a scale earlier alchemists could scarcely imagine. The laboratory changes; the wish is familiar.

Even Google has entered the territory of aging research. It backed Calico's launch in 2013, aiming to understand aging and develop medicines for longer, healthier lives—a more modest goal than immortality.

The larger dream is easy to understand. Who has not wanted freedom from need, or more time with someone they love? Yet judged against the alchemist's grandest promises, the ending is almost always familiar: the old alchemical disappointment, reached with astonishing new equipment. Useful discoveries may emerge, and fortunes may be made. The ultimate bargain remains elusive. Death, so far, has declined to revise its terms.

The Artist of the Long View [The Van Gogh Type / Sleeping Beauty] can work while the audience is absent. The problem has an internal beauty they want to bring into focus. To others, this person may seem scarcely in contact with reality. They may be answering to a different horizon: a lifetime's investment with no promise of compounding returns, perhaps paid only as a legacy.

Science has documented “Sleeping Beauties”: papers that attract little attention for years before receiving substantial recognition. The term describes a paper's fate, not proof that its author is an unrecognized genius. Obscurity alone cannot distinguish work ahead of its time from work that has failed to matter. I respect the willingness to keep testing while the reception remains uncertain.

Sometimes the pleasure is in the making.

The Artisan [The King / Sharp Dresser / The Stylish] has been having the same suit made properly for twenty years. Imagine the clean shave, the immaculate grooming, the sharp tie. The point is to remain exact, regardless of the season. There is something cool about getting it right.

An economical experiment, a clear figure, a method another person can use: the standard persists whether the work is fashionable or scarcely noticed. Numbers, visibility, and competition hardly enter into it. Making something worthy of their name is enough. I like that pride.

The Devotee [The Passionate] would probably continue if the audience vanished. There is love in mastering the technique, returning to the troublesome observation, giving a difficult question another year.

These are the marathon runners. Not everyone finishes. Some burn out or are injured; others adjust their pace to remain in the race. Some discover that the question has changed while they were faithfully pursuing it. I admire endurance that leaves enough of the person intact to enjoy the answer when it comes.

The Devotee's solemn cousin is the Ritualist [The Reverend]. School, college, higher education, academia: the path continues until its boundaries feel like those of life itself. Training and tradition provide order. The work becomes almost a religious practice, a liturgy handed down by a school of thought.

This temperament can produce some of the best and most careful science, especially when a question demands years of patient effort. It need not produce the most original question. If the method becomes too sacred to examine, a scientist can spend a lifetime polishing a key without noticing that the lock has changed.

The Replicator [The Reproducer] repeats the essential test of someone else's finding. There is no new conception at its center; the purpose is confirmation, or discovering that confidence was premature.

This is essential work. Replication tests an earlier finding with new data, helping us decide what deserves to be carried forward. Execution may require ingenuity. Importance and originality remain different judgments, and the honest reproducer makes the intellectual debt explicit.

The Incrementalist / Builder [The Small Gap Filler / Toolmaker] supplies a missing observation, a reliable dataset, a better instrument, or a method on which other discoveries depend. A narrow gap can conceal the reason an entire argument fails.

The motives vary. One scientist wants to make other work possible; another thinks, this is what is prevalent, so let me stick my name to it. Here the type overlaps with the Citizen Scholar working within the available world, or the Fashion Follower pursuing attention.

My concern is settling: mistaking another place to put one's name for something worth saying. We need people for whom even the sky is not the limit. There is room for the person who imagines a different skyline and the person who makes sure the stairs will hold.

For many of us, the reason for doing research is the person it might help.

The Advocate [The Knight] carries the patient into the research meeting. Direct care serves the person in front of us and deserves the highest standard. Research can extend that service to a population, including people exposed to poor science or conclusions that outrun the evidence.

Is aspirin or Plavix better for a particular group? Does taking another centimeter of tissue improve seizure freedom, or would preserving it better protect function? Who was excluded from the evidence? Simple questions may require large outcome studies and years of follow-up. Their consequences reach thousands of ordinary decisions, each belonging to someone for whom it is anything but ordinary.

The Citizen Scholar [The Normal Person / The Social] has a cause within reach: equality, social justice, an overlooked community, an institutional habit worth examining. Some have stumbled into academia and found a useful purpose there. I cannot always tell whether the motive is passion, civic concern, or simply where life has brought them.

The work need not be groundbreaking to be useful, though a worthy cause cannot rescue a poor study. I am drawn to discoveries that change the available possibilities. I also value the people who make the existing ones work more fairly.

The Interpreter [The Communicator] finds satisfaction in the moment another person understands. A dense result becomes an intelligible explanation; an unfamiliar field becomes a place a student, patient, or curious reader can enter. This scientific vocation deserves its place here.

The temptation is to improve the story until uncertainty disappears. In the 2019 headlines, words could preserve or erase the distance between recovering cellular functions and recovering consciousness. The best interpreters let others share the wonder without changing what happened.

Recognition brings another set of temptations. I met one of them in my own first response to the breaking news.

The Scorekeeper [The Competitive Racer] knows exactly where everyone stands. The h-index, citations, grants, appointments, journal impact: the landscape is marked with finishing lines. The subject can become secondary to the neighboring lane.

Competition brings discipline and urgency. I cannot pretend to be immune; I wondered who had got there ahead of us before realizing the work was ours. But if all you want is to overtake somebody, you have let them choose where you are going.

The Fashion Follower [The Trend Follower / Model / Mod] knows the season: which topic belongs on the banners, which phrase belongs in the grant title. The scientific wardrobe is current, the presentation polished, the best perfume arriving just ahead of them. Unlike the Artisan, they dress for the moment.

You can almost hear the thought: COVID is the hot topic; even three patients might become a paper. Small observations can be valuable, and urgent problems deserve rapid responses. My concern is topicality replacing a question—wanting a share of the heat without caring about the fire. Does the question still matter after the invitations stop? Yesterday's consuming passion can disappear so completely that one wonders where it was stored.

The Paper Manufacturer [The Revolver / Stacker / Number Counter / Impact Hunter / Score Maker] measures the day in output. Another paper. Another line. The Impact Hunter scans for the result that will raise the score. Volume alone tells us little; the factory mentality begins when output justifies itself.

Outside prestigious institutions, I understand the temptation to seek visibility through sheer numbers. Exchanging quality for a longer list still seems a poor bargain. Resources and reputation need not set the limit of a scientist's standards.

My own rule: never, ever, ever compromise on quality merely to add another line. My papers are open to criticism, too. I want to know what became clearer because they exist. Metrics can describe a career; I would rather they did not write its research agenda.

The Survivor [The Survivalist] deserves a careful reading. A salary, an expiring contract, a team depending on the next grant can make a manageable, fundable project the sensible choice. It is easy to recommend intellectual adventure from a permanent chair. Opportunism can turn science into a weapon for one's own survival; protecting the ability to work deserves a more generous reading.

Survival can nevertheless become the whole purpose. Nearby is the Coaster [The Tag-Along], comfortable attaching to whatever project has room. At the more desperate end is the Dependent [The Desperate], for whom academia has become the only life they know how to maintain. An easy position may be comfortable; for someone with no other horizon, stepping away may feel impossible. The line between keeping work possible and losing its purpose is not always visible from someone else's calendar.

The Idea Poacher [The Thief] lets a conversation become a project, then allows the conversation to disappear from its ancestry.

I have seen scientific meetings treated as shopping trips: take an idea home and return with much the same project carrying an “Ivy League” signature. Prestige can give it a better chance of being heard, published, and credited. Bringing a project to publication takes organizational skill; it does not settle where the insight began.

My exuberant “never done before” carried a little of this distinction, too. I wanted the satisfaction of contributing something original. We all borrow; acknowledging the source is part of the work. The unequal distribution of recognition is an old problem. The reproducer acknowledges the debt. The poacher lets it vanish.

The Corrosive Colleague [The Stinky Fish at the Bottom of the Sardine Box] is what it sounds like. A promising result invites insinuation; a junior colleague's confidence is there to puncture; a disagreement outlives its scientific content. The room grows careful for the wrong reasons.

An awkward personality or an unwelcome criticism is one thing. Habitually making others smaller is another. The odor becomes a communal problem, and nobody should have to lose their appetite for the work.

The Rule-Breaker [The Thug] crosses a more serious boundary: publishing without required institutional review board approval, cheating in the conduct of research, or altering numbers to obtain a desired result.

I have encountered this more than once. I do not always know what drives it: numbers, visibility, status, or the need to protect a cherished belief. Cognitive bias can make us see what we hope to see. Changing the evidence goes further.

I remember presentations reporting zero morbidity and mortality when I knew adverse events had occurred in the practices being described. The inconvenient outcomes had disappeared. Experiences like that have made me unwilling to trust a polished account merely because it is confidently delivered.

Fabrication, concealment of harm, and deliberate evasion of safeguards demand accountability. A full account of scientific fraud belongs elsewhere; the boundary matters here because intellectual freedom depends on trust.

The Sentinel [The Dark Knight / Batman / Robin Hood] appears when a field becomes too pleased with itself. A biomarker is celebrated; a technique gathers conclusions it may not be able to carry. At the edge of the applause, someone is still examining the claim.

I picture science's dark knight as a shadow larger than the city. The work may run directly against the trend. Numbers, visibility, even impact can recede beside the need to set something right. The sample is narrow; the comparison is unfair; the signal may have another explanation. The purpose is to complete what was omitted and correct what was overstated. Protection can sound like antagonism from the podium.

There is something of Robin Hood in returning authority to the people who live with a claim's consequences. The objection may itself prove wrong. It must face the same scrutiny. At its best, this is service to people the scientist will never meet.

There is also the Steward [The Teacher / Mentor], whose finest work often appears under other people's names. They teach thoroughly, share credit, build collaborations that survive disagreement, and allow a younger colleague to become more than an assistant to their own ambition.

This is generosity with practical consequences. A mentor can change the questions someone believes they are allowed to ask. A leader can make it possible for the rebel and the meticulous builder to work together without either being diminished. Some people leave a discovery. Some leave the conditions in which discoveries keep becoming possible.

Most of us are mixtures. An advocate enjoys a citation count. An artist needs a grant. A competitor becomes a generous mentor; a dutiful scholar surprises everyone with an act of rebellion. The same person can be an explorer in the morning, a survivor by lunchtime, and a scorekeeper after checking an online profile. I would distrust an account in which its author occupied only the flattering categories.

After twenty years, I still find it hard to believe that someone puts on a white coat intending harm, whatever their finances or potential rewards. I believe the heart is almost always in the right place. Fear, vanity, loyalty, fatigue, cognitive biases, survival instincts, and defensive habits can pull decent people toward poor decisions. That helps explain them; it does not excuse lying or fraud.

The variety can make us seem like different species. The mixtures make the picture more interesting and more beautiful. No list could contain us all.

My own allegiance is to originality and quality: a question without an audience, familiar things arranging themselves into something new, work that earns the time and trust it asks of others. I want those standards to survive the pressure to finish and publish. I still enjoy the work, and the people continue to surprise and amuse me.

That is why the email still makes me smile. Those few lines preserve my excitement, though they could hardly contain the years of work or the contributions of the research team. The headline was a moment. The life of science is everything around it: the wondering, the making, the competing, the correcting, the stubborn return to a question that has not quite yielded.

I still want to open a door that was not there before.

And I remain fascinated by the people who turn up with the keys.