Sci­en­tific progress is mak­ing most ground-breaking aca­d­e­mic achieve­ments occur later on in researchers’ lives. This in itself is not a bad thing, of course, but could it be sig­nalling the end of the poly­math (or the intel­lec­tual polyg­a­mist, as Carl Djerassi would pre­fer it be called)?

Back in the early 19th cen­tury you could grasp a field with a lit­tle read­ing and a ready wit. But the dis­tinc­tion between the dab­bling and doing is more demand­ing these days, because break­ing new ground is so much harder. There is so much fur­ther to trek through other researchers’ ter­ri­tory before you can find a patch of unploughed earth of your own.

Slightly under half of [Nobel lau­re­ates] did their path-breaking work in their 30s, a smat­ter­ing in their 20s—Einstein, at 26, was unusu­ally pre­co­cious. Yet when the lau­re­ates of 1998 did their sem­i­nal research, they were typ­i­cally six years older than the lau­re­ates of 1873 had been. It was the same with great inventors.

Once you have reached the van­guard, you have to work harder to stay there, espe­cially in the sci­ences. So many sci­en­tists are pub­lish­ing research in each spe­cial­ism that merely to keep up with the read­ing is a full-time job. “The fron­tier of knowl­edge is get­ting longer,” says Pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Rees, the pres­i­dent of the Royal Soci­ety […] “It is impos­si­ble now for any­one to focus on more than one part at a time.”