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The independent researcher (2018)

Adarsh Pandit recently introduced me to the concept of the “gentleman scientist”: a researcher who funds their work independently. After digging around a bit, I was fascinated to learn that independent researchers were fairly common in the 18th and 19th centuries.

And in the 1930s, Alfred Lee Loomis used his Wall Street wealth to start a laboratory in his mansion, nicknamed “The Palace of Science”, where physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi collaborated. He told the story of Norman Borlaug, an agronomist who developed disease-resistant wheat varieties that are estimated to have prevented over half a billion deaths worldwide. But Borlaug, in his naïvete, ended up not only disproving the theory, but accidentally producing wheat varieties that adapted to environments with varying amounts of sunlight.

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