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COLLABORATION PLUS SYNCHRONICITY

Rick Arlow is a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, getting an MD and a PhD in biomedical engineering. In his research, Rick is focusing on the process of deep brain stimulation—not just how to do it, but how to do it better. His confidence comes from going through the entrepreneurial process with a fellow student, Zach Bloom, at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. They were taking a course in integrated product development, which helped inspire them to develop a new method for obtaining better surgical airways in critically ill patients, called the SMART (Seldinger-Modified Airway Rescue Tracheotomy) Technique. When they met, Rick was an emergency medical technician, so he knew the world of emergency medicine. He and Zach began working toward the goal of redesigning the process of airway management in the field and hospital to increase patient safety and control high associated costs. That is, they sought to safely increase the adoption of a more challenging, yet beneficial, procedure for patients in the field and at their bedside through innovative design. Their design, serendipitously based on a viper fang, succeeds. The path was difficult, and marketing will be a challenge, but as they kept at it, they had a few eureka experiences.

Explaining one such breakthrough, Arlow said,

It came from me and Zach getting to know each other. We brought different backgrounds and areas of expertise. I was studying biomedical engineering and taking a class at Lehigh: Integrated Product Development. It's about the intersection of business and product development in early stage projects. Zach's was half biomedical engineering major and half economics major, and he was taking classes in how to do the business aspects, so he got involved in the entrepreneurial community at Lehigh.1

After an exam, we got together and decided to hang out and just play some guitar, because we both play music. I didn't know him before that, and afterward we started talking about what we were both interested in. At that point, we started thinking about trying to do a company ourselves. I was working as a student, setting up a project for a company that was a noninvasive lactic acid monitoring device. We didn't really know how the process worked or what we were getting into, but we decided to jump in and try it.

We had ideas initially that ultimately weren't close to what we finally decided to look into, which was a tracheotomy device. But that initial willingness to jump on board and start throwing out ideas, start balancing the time we had to regularly throw ideas off each other and other people, and eventually go ask the medical community. That was the way the aha! moment started for us. We realized this was something feasible, we each had professors who could help, and we knew students who were doing similar things as start-ups. We both knew this is what we wanted to be doing.

Being in that location [Lehigh's Baker Institute], and in that type of environment, I was able to see that this is something realistic that we could do, if I just put my mind to it and worked with Zach and found other people. Slowly we learned how to do the process. We learned how a medical device goes from conception to realization. It was the pairing of two people with complementary and overlapping skill sets, both deciding to work together. A lot of it was being in that environment at Lehigh. They had faculty members who were on board to be that type of advisor and to spend time talking with us.

Since then, we had an aha! moment about the product. We'd have these “idea dumps,” where we'd try to bring drawings or modifications of what we were working on. Zach had been reading a lot about bio-mimicry, and he'd looked at other products that had used it. He would come in with different pictures of animal parts, like fangs or a rhino [horn]. At the same time, the person who was giving us lab space in the biology building for testing our prototypes told us that he had an office downstairs, and if we need him we should just come down there. We asked him what he did in his office and he said, “I'm a snakebite expert.” He had a whole lair of snakes, and had slow-motion footage of how a snake bites, with all the components.

I've had a lot of aha! moments that didn't work. When we started, I had a list of twenty ideas, and Zach had his list, and most of them were pretty bad ideas, which wouldn't work out clinically or be economically viable. The better aha! moments, I think, correlate to how long you've been working in that field and thinking in that way and meeting those types of people. It doesn't have an immediate benefit. People spend most of their time doing nonurgent things, hearing other people's stories, going to different events, and seeing entrepreneurs do their thing. The more I meet with people in the field and work on the project, the better aha! moments I have. The ideas I have now for another device are better, faster, and more clear. I see better what's valuable.

SPOOKY ACTIONS

Although Einstein is often pictured alone when having an aha! moment, a significant one occurred as the result of an ongoing engagement with a friend whose expertise lay in a different field. Einstein had been pondering several ideas related to Galileo's approach to the velocity of light and energy. For over a year, he had tried to reconcile what seemed to be incompatible concepts. Often he would talk to a few close colleagues who grasped the physics involved. One was Michele Besso. This man, six years older than Einstein, shared with him a propensity for playing the violin. He was studying to become an electrical engineer. Einstein appreciated Besso's “sharp mind,” “outstanding intelligence,” and “elegance of thought.”2 He also noticed that Besso had a difficult time focusing on specific tasks, and, while delighted with Besso's apparent disorderliness, Einstein valued him most for his ability to listen to and grasp complex issues. They often talked for many hours at a stretch. For someone as self-directed in his studies as Einstein, Besso proved to be an invaluable sounding board.

Early in 1905, they walked together on what Einstein recalled as a beautiful day. He was quite direct about his desire that day to engage Besso in a discussion about theoretical questions that had become prickly. As they pondered the issues concerning motion, with Einstein laying out his various futile approaches thus far, he experienced an illuminated moment—the proverbial lightbulb. He had envisioned the solution to the problem. “With this new concept, I could resolve all the difficulties completely for the first time,” he later said.3 Within five weeks he had completed a paper on his special theory of relativity, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” In it, he acknowledged Besso's “valuable” suggestions. He told someone else that, in the whole of Europe, he could not have found anyone better with whom to try out his ideas. The evidence for this lies in their ongoing correspondence, which lasted half a century. (They even died three weeks apart.) Besso often could not comprehend how Einstein had gleaned the meaning that he did from “inadvertent statements,” but that is often the nature of creative collaborations: one person says or does something that another person filters into a different context, giving it a new spin.

About two years after Einstein published this famous paper, he was trying to push past it to address gravity. This effort found a soft spot in the wall of mental resistance to erupt in another flash. “I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern,” he stated years later, “when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: ‘If a person falls freely, he will not feel his own weight.’ I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me.”4 It led to his general theory of relativity, which revised Newton's laws and launched theoretical cosmology and quantum theory.

Among Einstein's other acquaintances who stimulated his thinking were his wife, Mileva Maric, mathematician Marcel Grossman, and medical student Max Talmey. They provided him with images from other arenas that served as elements in his thought experiments. He was able to imaginatively create a milieu that allowed him to visually play with physical relationships until they made sense to him. Einstein also developed a respectful friendship with Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who would make important contributions to the evolution of quantum physics. The two men strongly disagreed on certain fundamental concepts, but they sustained an intense debate that mutually fed their minds. Einstein valued clarity and simplicity, while Bohr was just as comfortable with the loose ends of ambiguity and complexity. He did not mind weirdness. Perhaps this came from his exposure to the existential notions espoused by his countryman Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century philosopher.

Regarded as a founding father of existentialism, Kierkegaard had observed that, for limited human beings, “truth is subjectivity,” and he had conceived of a “lived” dialectical tension in which a thesis (a condition) and its opposite could coexist without resolving into a transcending synthesis.5 Seemingly opposing things could both be true. Bohr appreciated this possibility, and some researchers believe it influenced the ideas he proposed in 1927 about complementarity. That is, something can exhibit certain properties under one set of conditions but also exhibit contradictory properties under others. No single representation provides a complete description of quantum phenomena. “In other words, if you design an experiment to see if electrons are waves, you get waves. If you design an experiment to test whether electrons are particles, you get particles.”6

Conflict and dispute, Bohr believed, offered ways to see all sides. Ideas could be rigorously defined by including aspects that might upset original views. He often constructed these notions—including solutions to puzzles—while engaged in a dialogue. “He loved to be contradicted in order to get deeper into the subject, but he progressed best when the person with whom he thrashed had the same attitude as himself, not only in approaching the problem but also in needing to penetrate its depth to the uttermost.”7

Bohr understood the value of surrounding himself with fertile, competent minds. During the mid-1920s, along with Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, he became one of the leaders in developing the framework of quantum reality. The task proved difficult and confusing, and the men engaged in sustained and exhausting debates. Bohr compared this group to mountain climbers moving through fog. They all knew they could not create a new paradigm without mutual cooperation. Bohr accepted conceptual conflict as a necessary part of the process and stated that he performed his best thinking during debates with equals. Through collaboration, they took on problems and found solutions that, as individuals, none had noted. While at Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen, Heisenberg proposed his famous uncertainty principle regarding the limits of experimental information—one can't precisely measure certain pairs of properties (position and momentum) at the same time. He used a unique representational mode to overcome the limits of visualization and to propose that electrons can exist in many locations simultaneously. How much other thinkers contributed to this idea is unclear, but these men were productively interdependent. The intellectual enterprise of each, they acknowledged, deepened and broadened that of the others.8

Not only did they tackle the complexities of ever-deepening scientific approaches from the Western world, but they also incorporated new ideas from the East. Einstein started the ball rolling, but Bohr and others moved it along toward a more holistic sense of reality. While seeming to be solid, they found, the world is actually made of vibrating molecules, atoms, and atomic subparticles; showers of high energy continually bombard Earth's atmosphere. Mysticism's awareness of fluid reality had something to contribute to help dissolve the rigid boundaries of mechanism.

Throughout the history of science, ideological foundations have been shattered and rebuilt as anomalous facts revolutionize perspectives. Classical physics had been defined within the seemingly concrete world of solid substance and uniform order. It was Aristotle who had organized and systematized concepts about the physical world. By the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes had divided reality distinctly into mind and matter, further entrenching our perceptions in dualism. The material world, he'd determined, was like a machine. Shortly thereafter, Isaac Newton made this notion the foundation for formulating his ideas—among them the laws of motion. Going into the twentieth century, Newtonian mechanics had defined scientific reality: mass was essentially passive, and its behavior could be predicted with certainty, because the laws of the universe were invariable.

In the East, views of reality evolved in a different direction. For them, spiritual principles grounded reality. Their philosophers, mostly mystics, viewed everything as interrelated. They tried to avoid the distortion of concepts by using meditation, metaphor, and paradox to access immediate experience. Truths were intuitive, elusive, and subjective. Although these mystics had very little, if any, influence on modern science, they valued paradoxical expression for communicating reality. Physicists, in studying the behavior of light, have discovered its paradoxical nature. Can light be both wave and particle? It seemed that it must be.

Physicists set about to relearn their discipline with an expanded awareness and new ways of thinking. With sophisticated technology, they intuited that the building blocks of nature were beyond sensory perception and could thus be known only indirectly. This came with uncertainty, which forced a change in many traditional assumptions. Not only could nothing be definitively measured at the subatomic level, but the observers were so uncertain that they wondered if the act of observation was creating the thing they thought they were observing. Probability replaced a solid sense of cause and effect.

All this brings us to our central metaphor for this chapter. Another physicist in this group of mountain climbers, Erwin Schrödinger, proposed entanglement theory (which also irked Einstein). With several collaborators, Einstein had proposed a thought experiment, which in turn inspired this idea. When two objects interact in a certain way, they become connected; so, measuring one particle affected another that could be a great distance away. Laboratories around the world now create such entanglements to study and to apply to technology and informatics. It's still weird and mysterious, but thanks to collaborative efforts from many different fields, it's become more manageable.

ONE AFFECTS OTHERS

Back to snaps: in physics, entanglement theory predicts that, under certain circumstances, seemingly isolated particles are actually instantaneously connected through space and time. In psychology, this might suggest that minds are similarly entangled, and in fact, many “snap” moments arise from rubbing elbows in a professional field.

During the early 1880s, Carl Koller graduated from the medical school of Vienna with Sigmund Freud. They had been classmates and remained friends and colleagues. Freud was experimenting with cocaine and in 1884 had published a monograph extolling its virtues as a way to cure morphine addiction. He invited Koller to collaborate with him on the effect of cocaine on muscle strength. Koller had already noticed the numbing effects of cocaine on the tongue, but it was not until a specific incident that he snapped on a practical application.

Koller had spent the summer in his lab, working on the treatments in ophthalmology. He was aware of the need to numb specific areas for closer work, but thus far, no one had discovered a substance for local anesthesia. A colleague placed some cocaine on his tongue and remarked about its effects. Koller agreed. But then he realized: this was the substance they were looking for! He had it in his pocket.

He went directly to his lab and urged his assistant to dissolve some grains of the cocaine powder into distilled water. They dripped this solution into the eye of a frog. They let it set before touching the eye with the sharp tip of a needle. When the frog did not react, they tried it on a dog and a rabbit. Then they tried it on themselves. It worked! They could not feel a thing. Koller's hydrochlorate of cocaine soon made international news in the medical world.9

Another story demonstrates a similar effect in spite of the central character's firm belief that solitude was the only way to work out solutions to difficult problems. Mathematician Andrew Wiles believed that his famous solution to a long-standing mystery was the result of working completely on his own, but it's clear from his process that he was immersed at all times in the framework of a community of minds.

For three centuries, Fermat's last theorem—an unknown proof for a mathematical proposition—had vexed mathematicians worldwide. Wiles came across it while reading in a library when he was ten years old. Fermat had written just one vexing thing about it: “I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” Wiles soon became obsessed with it, inspiring his career in mathematics. He found that many others before him had tried to solve it for some three hundred years, so he studied each approach. However, the solution eluded him as well. He put the problem aside to do other work until he heard that a colleague had linked “Fermat” to a related math mystery.

“At the end of the summer in 1986,” Wiles told an interviewer, “I was sipping iced tea at the house of friend. Casually, in the idle of a conversation, this friend told me that Ken Ribet had proved a link between Taniyama-Shimura and Fermat's Last Theorem. I was electrified. I knew that moment that the course of my life was changing…. My childhood dream was now a respectable thing to work on. I just knew that I could never let that go.”10

The theorem now seemed solvable. Wiles's obsession returned, and he withdrew into seclusion. He believed that one had to stay totally focused, in isolation, to fully brainstorm such a monolith. But over the course of seven long years, he experienced many setbacks. Sometimes he would go for a walk to let his subconscious work on its own, but this did not get him through his impasse. He described it as moving through a dark mansion: “You enter the first room of the mansion, and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally…you find the light switch. You turn it on and suddenly…you can see where you were. Then you move into the next room.”11

It was only when he came out of intellectual seclusion from time to time that he found a few pieces to this puzzle. On several occasions, Wiles was reading other papers or talking with colleagues when he'd recognize how something offered one of the missing pieces. This would send him back to work with a fresh perspective. One day in 1993, he was certain he had achieved his goal. He submitted his work to a review board, but after lengthy consideration, its members showed him a subtle error. Another setback.

Wiles sought out a former student to assist him in correcting the error, but both came up short. It was intensely frustrating. It appeared to Wiles that this obsession might have cost him many years of his life. He considered giving up. But he decided to give it one last try.

In September 1994, Wiles went to his desk and sat down. He looked through his papers. It felt as if the answer was there, somewhere. He just couldn't quite articulate it. Then he stopped and sat still.

“Suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation,” he reported. “It was the most important moment of my working life. It was so indescribably beautiful, it was so simple and elegant, I just stared in disbelief for twenty minutes.”

But he did not want to get his hopes up. He slept on it and looked again in the morning. Then he knew: “I got it!”12 And he had.

However, it was not total isolation that made the solution pop. Despite his periods of focused solitude, Wiles had stayed in touch with the mathematical community. He had read what others were doing, and he had brainstormed with a trusted friend. Clearly, the work of other mathematicians had assisted him, offering one piece after another, toward finally proving Fermat's last theorem.

Something very basic in our brains appears to be at the heart of these entanglements. While we often think of brilliant researchers being alone for hours, days, or months in their labs or offices, there is a social dimension to aha! moments that we should not overlook. In fact, a flash of insight was part of this very discovery of a social dimension: the existence of mirror neurons. These brain cells become active when subjects are observing others in the same way they would when they'd actually performed this action themselves.

In Italy during the early 1990s, Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, placed electrodes in the ventral premotor cortex of a monkey to study the neurological mechanisms involved in hand and mouth movements. One day, a graduate student lifting an ice cream cone noticed that the monkey's brain showed activity even when the monkey that was watching him did not move. Inspired, the researchers set up experiments to examine what was occurring in the brain when monkeys observed others engaged in specific behaviors. Rizzolatti discovered that the same brain cells fired when the monkey was watching an activity as when the monkey performed the activity. He dubbed the neural mechanism “mirror neurons.” By this, he meant that certain brain cells start processing sensory information when a monkey sees or hears an action that its own body can perform. According to brain scans with fMRI, which monitor human brain activity indirectly, humans appear to possess mirror neurons as well.

Mirror neuron systems in humans that respond to behavior and intention are located in the inferior parietal lobula and the ventral premotor cortex, while a mirror neuron system in the insula responds to emotional situations. In one experiment, researchers asked participants to infer an intention from someone performing an act. There were three conditions, which conveyed a context, an act, and an intention:

  1. Objects were arranged on a table as if ready for someone to drink tea or as if someone had just finished;
  2. a hand grasped a mug without any context;
  3. a hand grasped a mug to drink or to clear the table.

The mirror systems activated in contexts where the intention to act was evident, as well as when a specific identifiable action occurred. Since this brain activity is similar to what we see in primate research, and primate research directly monitors specific mirror neurons via implants in the brain, we can apply the conclusions from primate research to humans.13

Thus, our brains appear to be capable of understanding and empathizing with another person's actions and emotions. Imitation makes culture possible, including research projects that produce snaps. Through interaction, we're experiencing not just what others are doing but how they view what we're doing. That is, we can see ourselves through others' eyes. Mirror neurons make socialization possible on many different levels. We recognize others' emotions as simulations of our own emotions.

“The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space,” writes researcher Vittorio Gallese, “also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multilevel personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they experience.”14 Because we have a shared neural substrate, we don't just see an action when we observe it, we experience it as if we're doing it, too.

SNAP, CRACKLE, POP

The research team that combines the art appreciation with medical training has also looked at group dynamics. Mary Thorndike leads a workshop directed at team thinking, in which Joel Katz participates when he can.

“The issue we address is that medicine is becoming a team activity,” says Katz.

We take these participants to the Sackler Museum in Cambridge. We invite an entire team—the senior physician, the resident, the intern, the med students, the nurses, the social workers, and the physical therapists. We focus on team-building skills, such as communication, interdisciplinary relationships, and decision making. The exercises focus around visual arts. We might start with Pan and Psyche by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. It shows Pan and Psyche in an ambiguous pose, with a lot of vulnerability. We use it to talk about hierarchy and relationships. Then we take them to a Rembrandt painting, Portrait of an Old Man, and have them pretend this is their patient, or their father as a patient. They talk in subgroups about what's going on. Each gets to say one thing to the other groups. Then they put a poem together about it.

The concluding event is to take them to a modern abstract piece of work called I'm with Stupid, by Rachel Harrison. There's a lot going on in this piece, and it's hard to interpret. Whenever you think you know what's going on, you see that something else is going on.

Participants discover in these workshops that every member of the team has something valuable to contribute. They learn about team dynamics. Then we [the researchers] observe markers, or outcomes, of team functioning, like how quickly they [make] round[s], and how many phone calls are required after rounds to clarify points. We do this before and after the sessions, to see if there are measurable improvements in the ability of that group to function as a team. We find that this exercise helps people work better as a team.15

Other groups have devised intriguing group exercises as well. The aim of 6-3-5 Brainwriting, developed in Germany in 1969 for a structured approach to creative advertising, is to gather six people and have them generate 108 new ideas in half an hour. The ideas do not need to be good. The important aspect is to keep them flowing, with each person offering three every five minutes. The starting person writes three ideas on one line on a sheet of paper. Then she passes the paper to the next person, who reads them and generates three more, either working off these or adding something else. The participants are encouraged to find inspiration in something someone else might have said, taking it further or applying it in a different way. All participants are active, no moderator is required, no discussions close off avenues, and the pressure generates energy. (It might also inspire anxiety, however.)

“Rolestorming” is another fun approach to generating ideas in a group. In this, a group gathers to think about a problem together, but each takes on a role. For example, the “superheroes” method involves addressing a problem the way Superman, Spiderman, Thor, or Wonder Woman might. Group members might facilitate this by wearing masks or costumes, but the goal is to adopt a perspective different from one's own: “What would Superman think about this?” Literary or fictional character rolestorming groups work as well: “How would Sherlock Holmes approach this?” Or, “What might King Arthur do?”

Psychologist Howard Gardner, who conceptualized multiple intelligences, believes that creative breakthroughs in such settings or communities are highly charged and need support. He compared the process to the development of a new language. To survive and flourish, there must be committed communicators who provide opportunities to practice and learn.16 Cognitive scientist, Nobel laureate, and polymath Herbert A. Simon, who relied on an interdisciplinary approach for his greatest contributions, stated, “To make interesting scientific discoveries, you should acquire as many good friends as possible who are energetic, intelligent, and knowledgeable as they can be. Then sit back and relax. You will find that all the programs you need are stored in your friends, and will execute creatively and productively as long as you don't interfere too much.”17

Despite distinct individuals being credited with important discoveries, most realize that teamwork, brainstorming, and even just the inarticulate absorption of the professional culture have contributed to their insights. No matter how reclusive an inventor might be, as we saw with one of the most extreme examples in Andrew Wiles, no one works entirely alone. Crossing paths can spark any number of ideas, even if you weren't thinking of anything specific at the time.

THE SURPRISE FACTOR

Frances Glessner Lee was the daughter of John Jacob Glessner and thus heir to the International Harvester fortune. Born March 25, 1878, in Chicago, “Fanny” was raised in privilege and privately tutored. As she grew up, she hoped to study law or medicine, but her father would not hear of her going to a university. She had to watch her brother George study at Harvard while she remained home to learn the domestic skills expected of a wealthy young lady. She was disappointed. Little did she realize then that one of her talents would be at the heart of a significant contribution. She would find her bliss as well as improve medicolegal education for many.

The Glessners had a thousand-acre summer home in New Hampshire's White Mountains called “the Rocks.” Fanny was there during a school holiday when her brother brought home a friend, George Burgess Magrath. He was studying in the field of legal medicine with a focus on death investigation, and his tales excited the young woman. She told her father about it, but he declared that no member of his family would get involved in such a sordid subject.

Still, Magrath's tales about medicine, investigation, and death continued to fire Fanny's imagination. Whenever she had the opportunity, she took him aside to learn whatever she could. In addition, she loved reading Sherlock Holmes stories, especially how a single clue might completely change how to interpret the circumstances. Fanny enjoyed the surprise factor.

When she was twenty, Fanny married Blewett Lee, an attorney and law professor at Northwestern University. They had three children before the marriage failed and they divorced.

A common pastime during this era for women of means was to make miniatures. Fanny was artistic, and as a gift to her musicloving mother, she created a miniature replica of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She spent two months crafting ninety tiny musicians, all fully garbed and each with a musical score and instrument. Her mother was delighted, so Fanny tried another one. She created a chamber orchestra of four musicians but concentrated on them in such detail that the project took two years. The musicians on whom she had based it were astonished by the resemblance.

Yet this was not what Fanny wanted to do with her life. Her father died when she was fifty-two, leaving her quite wealthy—and determined to pursue her own interests. Magrath had become the chief medical examiner for Suffolk County (Boston), and he confided to Fanny the need for better training for death investigators. Although a Medicolegal Society had formed in Massachusetts, passionate physicians like Magrath had to pick up the torch.

She was disturbed about crimes that went unsolved or unpunished. With her usual industry, Fanny set about to become an expert in the field, and, despite being a woman, she came to be viewed as an authoritative consultant. In the years to come, she would receive an honorary appointment as a captain of the New Hampshire State Police, would become the first woman to be invited to the initial meetings of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and would become the first female invited into the International Association for the Chiefs of Police.

In part, Fanny achieved these recognitions because of her innovations in the medicolegal field. Convinced that she had found her calling—had, in fact, known it all along—Fanny urged Magrath to tell her what she could do. He suggested that she found a medicolegal department, with an endowed chair, at Harvard.

Fanny was ready. At the Rocks, she created a home close to Boston. Fanny helped to establish a department at Harvard for the teaching of legal medicine, with Magrath as its first chair, and paid the salary of its first professor. In Magrath's name, she donated a library of more than a thousand books and manuscripts that she had collected from around the world. However, after developing the Department of Legal Medicine with Fanny, Magrath died in 1938. Fanny was heartbroken, but she continued to support Magrath's vision.

Soon, she would have her flash of insight. Fanny had noticed during the course of her studies that police officers often made mistakes when trying to determine whether a death was the result of an accident, a natural event, a suicide, or a homicide. Too often they simply missed clues. She thought that something concrete and practical should be done to mitigate this.

Then she realized: she knew exactly what to do! She had made those musicians, with their instruments, music sheets, and chairs. She could make dolls like that again, but stick them into miniature crime scenes. They could be made to scale and include items found in actual crime scenes. Fanny knew plenty of crime stories and had been on ride-alongs with police, as well as to morgues and autopsy suites. To get more material, she had but to call on friends she had made among detectives. She had everything she needed to make it happen, including a spacious work area at the Rocks.

Fanny set aside the second floor of her mansion, filling one room entirely with miniature furniture. Some pieces she picked up during her travels, but she hired a carpenter to make others. He (and later his son) also made the dollhouses, which Fanny christened the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. (Her inspiration came from a phrase used by police: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”) To create each diorama, Fanny blended several stories, sometimes going with police officers to crime scenes, sometimes reading reports in the newspapers, and sometimes utilizing fiction. She might even interview witnesses.

Fanny spent an enormous amount of time on each Nutshell, making many of the items herself. The project combined her interest in interior design, her talent for detail, her interest in crime, and her eye for antiques. Each doll was made by hand: “She began with loose bisque heads, upper torsos, hands meant for German dolls, and with carved wooden feet and legs. She attached these loose body parts to a cloth body stuffed with cotton and BB gun pellets for weight and flexibility. She carefully painted the faces in colors and tones that indicated how long the person had been dead.”18 Fanny added sweaters and socks that she'd knitted with great difficulty on straight pins and items of clothing that were meticulously handsewn. Once the dolls were ready, Fanny would decide just how each should “die,” and proceed to stick knives in them, hang them from nooses, burn them, and paint signs of decomposition on their skin.

The little crime scenes, from cabins to three-room apartments to garages, were also her design, built on a scale of one inch to one foot. Each one cost about the same amount as an average house at that time. Fanny did not care. It seemed to her the best way to use her inheritance.

Once Fanny had several “dollhouses of death” completed, she used them as part of the weeklong seminars she sponsored at Harvard twice a year for the many different professionals involved in law enforcement. One day of each week was set aside to showcase the Nutshells, which were kept in a temperature-controlled room. Participants were granted a limited period of time to look at each scenario, take notes, and report back to the others. The point was not to “solve” the crime but to notice important evidence that could affect investigative decisions. The exercise was meant to help instill an appreciation for the art of vigilance and to help exercise it as a skill. By the time Fanny finished her ambitious project, she had nineteen detailed Nutshells (which are still preserved).

Her vision was finally realized. By 1949, some several thousand doctors and lawyers had been educated at the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine, and thousands of state troopers, detectives, coroners, district attorneys, insurance agents, and crime reporters had attended Fanny's seminars.19 Fanny had found her calling, merging a skill from one context to enhance another. The convergence in her life of an acquaintance, a keen passion, plenty of money, and an opportunity had transformed her preparation for tranquil domesticity into a satisfying enterprise that effectively tapped her knowledge and experience. Thanks largely to her years of conversations with Magrath and her exposure to the world of medicolegal education, Fanny had been prepped to snap a unique innovation. In this case, what seemed to be serendipity was actually synchronicity. She had only to be attuned to it with sufficient vigilance to act on opportunity. Like the others who accepted inspiration from contact with others, Fanny had used this medium to pursue her passion and benefit the group.20

KEY POINTS