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FORUM
Exploring the Science of Change
By Alex Carter Late at night, their mournful cries echo through the halls of HMS research facilities. "Oooohhhhh, I'm not making any progress.... I'll never graduate.... My work is meaningless, ooooohhhh." To these graduate students racked by despair, I offer a glimmer of hope in the vessel of a small, unassuming book by Malcolm Gladwell titled The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Part of the author's thesis is that we do not live in the world we think we live in, where trends evolve gradually, where cause and effect are directly related. Gladwell argues that rapid, unexpected changes in a social system can and will take place and that the best way to understand those changes is to think of them as a spreading epidemic. He explores three rules required for the spread of epidemics. Some seem like common sense; others challenge our most deeply held assumptions. Systems Do It...The first, the law of the few, proposes that a small group of individuals, who either have an extensive network of connections or possess specialized knowledge, provide epidemics of change with their initial momentum. The second law, the stickiness factor, underscores why a new behavior or idea must have a long-lasting effect if it is to spread epidemically. The third law, the power of context, reveals how the environment can influence the behavior of individuals, bringing into question human autonomy itself.This framework is fleshed out with numerous case studies ranging from the success of Paul Revere's midnight ride to the precipitous, unexpected drop in crime in New York City at the end of the last decade. The scientific principles underlying Gladwell's model are not exactly new. Economists, mathematicians, and all kinds of scientists have been intrigued by the behavior of complex systems for some time. And to explain the baffling changes in the stock market, weather patterns, fluid dynamics, or the human brain, they have begun to develop thinking tools with exotic names like parallel distributed processing, non-linear dynamics, and chaos theory. Although Gladwell focuses on sociological trends, rapid, fundamental changes are common in science, too, and examples of thresholds abound. At 34 degrees, you get rain. At 31 degrees the world is completely transformed. Apply a small electric current to part of a nerve cell and nothing happens. Increase that current past a certain point and the nerve cell will generate its own current that will instantaneously spread to the rest of the cell. Not all tipping points are so basic. The field of signal transduction is dedicated to understanding how individual cells transform environmental cues into behavioral responses. Currently the state of the art consists of identifying all the molecules a cell needs to analyze just one external cue. In reality, any cell is constantly integrating hundreds or thousands of different kinds of cues. Little is known about the interactions of these cues or the tipping points that may cause a cell to either flourish or commit suicide. In other fields, fancy electrodes allow neuroscientists to record the activity of many neurons at once. Gene chips make it possible to determine which combination of thousands of genes are activated at the same time. Do different patterns of electrical or gene activity relate to specific biological responses? And how does the system tip from one pattern to another? The descendants of the tipping-point concept may eventually prove useful for thinking about these more complex systems. Paradigms Do It...Scientific ideas can also have tipping points. But history has shown that the correctness of an idea is no guarantee of its success. The hypothesis that the Earth spins on its axis and moves around the sun did not gain acceptance until it had been resurrected and championed by the likes of Copernicus and Galileo. Furthermore, as Gladwell suggests, for ideas to spread they must be "sticky." Scientific ideas often develop their stickiness by establishing practical or conceptual usefulness. The implications of the germ theory for public health and the power of Hebb's rule (that nerve cells that are simultaneously active strengthen their connections) probably contributed significantly to their respective success. The explosive growth of the Internet in the last five years, which few could have predicted in 1994, is a technosocial example of the tipping point in action.Obviously, not all ideas reach their tipping point. The field of complex systems has been attracting the attention of people interested in how complex behaviors and patterns can emerge from interactions among simple components. Ironically, this paradigm, which circumscribes Gladwell's thesis, has yet to make it into the scientist's regular set of tools. Maybe the addition of Gladwell's book to the growing literature on the subject is the little change needed to tip the idea into public consciousness. Grad Students in Their Prime Do It...Science and medicine have different approaches to the concept of tipping points. Scientists are interested in predicting how a system will behave so we can claim to understand it. Medicine is interested in controlling how a system behaves so we can restore health to individuals and communities. Health care professionals have a stake in learning how to make their own "positive" epidemics tip to counter HIV, drug abuse, smoking or to promote preventive interventions like mammograms, prostate exams, and immunizations. Scientists, however, could also stand to learn a play or two from this book to help us become better communicators about our work, which might help avoid the kinds of backlash recently seen against genetically modified foods and gene therapy.The agonizingly slow pace of progress and the receding goal of graduation and uncertainty that your work will ever lead to anything interesting are common themes in the middle of graduate school training. But in conversations with older students who are near graduation, I have often heard similar comments: that they reached an unexpected critical point, turned a corner beyond which their work came together and they began publishing papers and writing their thesis. They had reached their own tipping points. Gladwell's message is that it doesn't always take much to tip the balance if you understand the forces involved. On the other hand, lots of hard work doesn't hurt either. —Alex Carter, a sixth-year MD–PhD student in the HMS neuroscience program |
