That elusive ‘Eureka!’ moment

You might say that journalists, especially the news variety, are jacks of all trades and masters of none. We flit from story to story and become experts on just about anything for minutes, hours, days or however long the mercurial news cycle chooses to focus its klieg lights on a story.

We are great conversationalists at cocktail parties because we can talk about any subject, and probably have some crazy story or pithy anecdote about the world at large, for about five minutes. Most would say we have ADHD; we in the business would call that productive.

That’s why I am always amazed and inspired when I am given the extraordinary opportunity to meet scientists and scholars who spend their entire lives studying one thing—indefinitely and with no guarantee of a successful outcome.

In the last six months I have been in labs at NYU, MIT and Harvard, as well as the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, all of which have incredible collections of some of the smartest people on the planet. These are scientists who are not just advancing a story—they are advancing the human race. What makes these extraordinary people tick?

“I think scientists, as a species, are quite skeptical and that’s good,” said Dr. Amy Wagers, a researcher at Harvard University featured on “TechKnow.”

“[You] always keep pushing on your idea until the absolute only explanation is the one that you have.”

And more often than not, scientific breakthroughs take years, often a lifetime. For Wagers and her Harvard colleague, Dr. Richard Lee, it took five years to discover the GDF11 protein, which may one day give us clues how to cure diastolic heart failure in humans.

“There are always a lot of down times in science. It does take a personality used to handling rejection and dark periods,” said Lee. “I often ask people if they have ever asked someone out and they said no and then were bothered about it for more than a couple of days—[if so] you probably shouldn’t do science.”

A lot of people might think scientists are overtaken by their left-brain and score high on the nerd spectrum, but in actuality the scientists I’ve had the pleasure to meet have great passion and drive. (After all, how many stem cell experts jump out of airplanes? You have to watch this week to find out more about that!)

“There’s a lot of hard work and not knowing you’re going to achieve the end point,” said Wagers. “You can’t know when you’ll get there. So when you actually find something, you have new knowledge and I think these moments should be celebrated. And that helps you push through to next time.”

Perhaps the person who operates within the greatest big picture is Dr. Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He looks at Earth as a space scientist with no boundaries between countries—just one group of people sharing the same sun, the same atmosphere. It’s something he wishes more people could understand.

"I don’t think anybody has limitations, it’s really what you put your mind to do," Elachi said. "The human mind is amazing. I personally don’t believe that things are genetic, that smart people are genetic—I think all of us are the same. We start with the same capacity. It’s really the drive that you have and the environment that you live in. "

Elachi's leadership is widely credited for inspiring the Mars Curiosity team to create, build and successfully land the Rover on Mars.

"I don’t think ever in my 40 years of JPL that I didn’t feel like I didn’t look forward to coming to work in the morning, because there is always something exciting," he said. "And I look forward to going home to my family because I want to tell what was accomplished that day. You create an aura around you and the people around you are excited and inspired about what they are doing because they are accomplishing something really important for humanity. I think those two go together."

Watch "TechKnow," Sunday 7:30ET/4:30PT, to learn more about GDF11 and the scientists who are studying it.