Creativity as an antidote to research becoming too predictable.

Research suggests that there are immediate benefits from knowledge breadth for creativity - even scientists just at the beginning of their academic journey should benefit from developing expertise in additional domains (Mannucci & Yong, [8]). In this commentary, Sonne-Hansen and colleagues argue that research leaders and organizations should encourage more "theory-guessing" by budding young scientists, rather than incentivizing safe mainstream research. In the late 1960s, Thomas Brock, a microbiologist from Cleveland, and his undergraduate student Hudson Freeze conducted research in Yellowstone National Park. From a sample of pink bacteria collected from Mushroom Spring, Brock and his student isolated a prokaryotic organism thriving at 70°C, which they named I Thermus aquaticus - i after the Greek word for "hot" and the Latin for "water.". [Extracted from the article]