New Scientist - USA (2021-02-06)

6 February 2021 | New Scientist | 43

for doing things like music or dance or drama

that allow them to explore their physical space,

for performing to other people and working in

groups – all those things that the process of

becoming expert builds on – are being stripped

out of the curriculum. More and more, we’re

being encouraged to think that really only the

sciences are worth doing, all the rest is touchy-

feely stuff that doesn’t matter. This absolutely

couldn’t be further from the truth – partly

because, as humans, we need those different

aspects, but partly because there is just as

much craftsmanship and performance in

expert laboratory science as there is anywhere

else. We are impoverishing people at an early,

formative stage and it’s very difficult to get

these things back.

Coronavirus limits our ability to physically

learn together, possibly long-term. How do

we deal with that?

That’s a very interesting issue. I’ve been talking

with some colleagues – a magician, a musician,

a teacher and a clinician – about how to make

sense of the online world in teaching practical

skills, whether it’s playing a keyboard

instrument, doing magic tricks or putting a

central line in somebody in an intensive care

unit. There are some interesting possibilities,

including technologies such as haptics, but at

the moment there are more questions than

answers on that one.

Would you say you are now an expert on

being an expert?

(Laughs) One thing that unites all the people

I spoke to is that becoming an expert has a

beginning, but it doesn’t have an end. All of

them say, “Well, I can’t do it as well as it could

be done”. There isn’t some point you get to

sit down in a chair, beam benignly and say,

“Now I’m an expert”. It is a continuous

progression, and that’s what makes it so

fascinating to study. ❚

we should just have another look at those

ones in the top-right-hand corner; I don’t know

why, I just feel we should” – and she was right.

There’s something that she was only able to

do because she’d spent 20 or 30 years actually

doing stuff with her sleeves rolled up with

cell cultures and looking at microscopes. Her

expertise was a very physical thing, a sense

of where to look, an awareness of the whole

context of what she was doing. Experts I’ve

talked to in all sorts of fields say again and

again, it’s about getting things into your hands

and your fingers – even if it’s just interpreting

graphs or printouts as a scientist or engineer,

it’s a physical thing, and it takes time to

become good at it.

Do we give people the necessary time and

space to become an expert?

If you accept that becoming an expert in

whatever requires a very long time, and it

requires a nutrient environment, where you

have time to do stuff, and get things wrong

at the beginning and be protected, and then

become independent and go through all these

stages, when you look at what’s happening

from quite an early age, certainly in the UK,

there are real problems.

All those opportunities that people used to

have at school for doing stuff with their hands,

In medicine, as in many walks

of life, knowing when to intervene

and when not to is a critical aspect

of expertise

As a master, you must obviously take

responsibility not only for the people you’re

working for, but for other people who are also

doing that work: apprentices, trainees, PhD

students or whoever. But under the surface,

you’re having to develop that quality of

wisdom and to shape other people’s direction.

There’s two crucial skills you only develop

in this phase. First, how to deal with error, both

in terms of recovering from an error – crucial

obviously as a surgeon, but in a whole host

of other areas, too – and building up your own

resilience. And you learn to improvise – not in

the sense of just knocking something up on

the spur of the moment because you haven’t

thought about it in advance, but in being able

to respond to the unexpected, and to bring into

play all the knowledge and experience you’ve

gained to make a sensible response to an

unpredicted situation. That’s the sort of

wisdom in expertise we’re looking for now.

And building that sort of expertise takes a lot

of time and effort?

Absolutely, and there are no shortcuts. One

of my colleagues at Imperial, Sara Rankin,

a professor of stem cell biology, mentioned

a breakthrough her research group made

recently when they were looking at populations

of cells under the microscope. She said, “I think

Richard Webb is executive

editor of New Scientist

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