Invest in team builders, not science stars, urges Nobelist

Leading a singalong to a Swedish pop song is not how most would imagine celebrating the receipt of a Nobel Prize medal. After all, the Nobel banquet is a famously formal white-tie affair.

But David MacMillan’s more relaxed celebrations with colleagues, after pandemic-era travel restrictions put a halt to Stockholm’s traditional gala dinner, were fitting given his commitment to team science. “I hired a pub in Princeton for 150 people, which is where I did my live interviews to Sweden,” explained the 53-year-old Scot. “They had a live band playing an Ace of Base song which we used to sing when I was a postdoc, so when they cut to us everyone was singing it – it was quite surreal.”

The Princeton University professor won his Nobel with Germany’s Benjamin List for work – independent of each other – to create cheap, green organic catalysts, but the future location of his Nobel shows how he wants others to share in his triumph. “They actually give you four medals, so one is going to rotate between co-workers to keep for a week or so – it will keep moving until it gets lost,” said Professor MacMillan.

THE Campus resource: How to successfully develop and run interdisciplinary research teams

One of the first stops will surely be the University of Glasgow, where he was an undergraduate. But it was not his first choice. “No one in my high school – with the exception of my brother – went to university, and when he got a job, he began earning more money than my dad,” Professor MacMillan told Times Higher Education. “So my dad was certain that I should go to university – and do exactly the same course at the same university as my brother. But I didn’t get into Strathclyde, so I went to Glasgow.”

Professor MacMillan said he later switched to chemistry because the physics lecture hall was too chilly, and he became truly committed to his discipline when introduced to organic chemistry. “For the first time, everything was very understandable – so chemistry perhaps chose me, I didn’t choose it,” he said.

Another stroke of luck occurred when Hal Moore at the University of California, Irvine, took an interest in a letter that dropped in his mailbox. “I applied to 19 universities in America to do a PhD, and only one replied. Hal wrote back saying, ‘You can’t just get a PhD by writing to people, you have to fill out an application form,’ and he went out of his way to help me,” Professor MacMillan recalled. “About three months later, this letter showed up – it was an outrageous amount of money to give a 21-year-old to do a PhD, in California, so I had to take it.”

After moving to Harvard University for his postdoc, Professor MacMillan was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was offered tenure within two years (“a record, I think”). But instead, he took a job at the California Institute of Technology, staying for six years before moving to Princeton in 2006, where he later led the chemistry department for five years.

“It was a big rebuilding effort which worked out really well. One of the key things was rebuilding the culture, trying to figure out what you want to keep from all those experiences that you’ve had – and rejecting the things that were not so great,” he said.

“Princeton was putting more than half a billion dollars into chemistry to rebuild, so they offered me this opportunity to spend their money. I wanted to see if I could pull it off. And now it’s doing spectacularly well, it’s just as exciting as anything else that’s happening to me now.”

Princeton’s investment in chemistry may be fairly extraordinary – even by Ivy League standards – but Professor MacMillan argued that the UK could not shy away from upping its science spending. “If you look at research output per pound spent, the UK blows away everyone in the world – it’s not even close,” he said.

“That is an amazing thing, but government agencies understand that, too, and think, ‘We can keep this lean and mean.’ That’s fine, up to a certain point, but if you wanted to blow the doors off the whole thing and be a world leader, the UK could just invest a little bit more money to give people a chance to do riskier things.”

Professor MacMillan did not rule out a return to the UK – it is unlikely, but “never say never”, he said – but wondered if the British government’s emphasis on attracting overseas Nobel winners to the UK was the right way forward. “Nobel prizewinners are fine, but they are just ordinary people who come in different shapes and sizes – identifying people who are really good at putting together people is the better way to go,” he suggested.

“You wouldn’t just take anyone who had won a World Cup medal and put them in charge of your national [football] team – some might be really brilliant, and some will be awful. It’s an amazing prize, [but] it doesn’t always point to the best people to run a team.”

The main focus must be on improving British science, he said. “If it was up to me, I’d hire people who know how to build a group, with a talent for bringing things together. Maybe it’s my socialist upbringing, but if you care about the group, great things will happen to departments.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com