"Be like the Renaissance"

There was a movie in the 1990's starring Danny DeVito, Gregory Hines, James Remar, and Cliff Robertson that was directed by Penny Marshall called Renaissance Man.  Despite an all-star cast (look the actors up if you don't recognize their names) and a superb director, the film was a commercial flop (grossing US$ 24 million compared to a US$40 million budget).  The film critics hated it (Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars and said "it feels like a cross between Dead Poets Society and Private Benjamin but does not have the warmth or spirit of those films").  Basically, DeVito played a divorced, down-on-his-luck advertising executive who loses his job, files for unemployment, and is given a temporary job to teach basic literacy classes to a group of misfit Army recruits at a nearby military base.  DeVito's character uses Shakespeare to teach his pupils how to read.  At the climax, one of the soldiers recites King Henry V's St. Crispin's Day Speech from Shakespeare's Henry V to rally the soldiers during a night-time training exercise.  Everyone passes with flying colors, DeVito's character gets a full-time job teaching Army recruits, and everyone lives happily ever after. 


Okay, why am I telling you about a movie that received a 17% Rotten Tomatoes rating?  It's all in the title - "Renaissance Man."  The urban dictionary defines "Renaissance man" as any individual (male or female, so we should say "Renaissance Person") with many talents or areas of knowledge.  There is another term that is more gender neutral - "polymath" - but essentially the term comes from the fact that so many celebrated figures from the Renaissance period were experts in a variety of seemingly unrelated subject areas.  The best example of a "polymath" is perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, who was famous for being an expert or mastering the disciplines of art, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, anatomy, and others. 


David Epstein and Malcolm Gladwell (yes - that Malcolm Gladwell) wrote an editorial in the journal, Ophthalmology (January 2018 issue) entitled, "The Temin Effect."  Howard Temin received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of reverse transcriptase, but he is perhaps just as famous for being a polymath (a so-called "Renaissance Person" in every sense of the word).  Epstein and Gladwell surmise that one of the reasons that Temin was able to "think outside the box" and come up with his discovery was the fact that he was so widely read and expert in other disciplines outside of science.  Recall that the widely accepted "central dogma" in molecular biology states that genetic information passes unilaterally from DNA to RNA to protein.  Temin's discovery of reverse transcriptase proved the converse - genetic information could go in the opposite direction from RNA to DNA.  As Epstein and Gladwell state in their editorial, "To imagine a possibility so heretical required imagination.  It required a paradoxical turn of mind.  It was, in a way, an observation born as much of a literary sensibility as a scientific one.  Temin's wide interests were not extraneous to his scientific pursuits.  A case can be made that they were in the service of his scientific pursuits."


Epstein and Gladwell's editorial was in response to a study by Jaclyn Gurwin and colleagues, in which medical students were randomized to an art training group versus a control group (no training in art).  The art training group attended professional art classes art classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (the study was conducted at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania).  The investigators in this study believed that by learning about art, these medical students would learn to better observe and describe physical examination findings - in this case, the ophthalmologic examination.  After six 1.5 hour training sessions at the Museum of Art, the first year medical students performed much better on a proctored ophthalmology physical examination test!  Herein lies proof (maybe) of Epstein and Gladwell's so-called "Temin Effect."


If I had to do it all over again, I would have spent more time during my school years taking a wider range of humanities classes.  Fortunately, I have reached a stage in my academic career where I can now spend more time reading and learning about things that I wished I would have learned a long time ago.  The lessons here for leaders is one that I have made before, but I think it is important and bears repeating.  Be well read.  Learn about things outside your area of expertise.  Be like the Renaissance.  You won't regret it.