Seeing What Others Don't See

Pictured Above Jack Horner

An example of a highly talented and innovative dyslexic working in science instead of business is John R. (Jack) Horner. Well known to young enthusiasts of dinosaur films and to professional paleontologists, Jack Horner was written up in the "Scholarship" section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade tabeloid newspaper for university professors. The article seems an odd, perhaps self-spoofing choice for the Chronicle, since Jack Horner is about as far from the traditional scholar as anyone can imagine. It is true that he has an honorary doctorate and now supervises 12 Ph.D.candidates. But Horner never completed an undergraduate degree nor, indeed, any graduate work--having flunked out of the University of Montana six times. Yet, in spite of this, as the Chronical article explains, after he had established himself, "his brilliant synthesis of evidence . . . forced paleontologists to revise their ideas about dinosaur behavior, physiology, andevolution" (McDonald).

Horner never earned an undergraduate degree because he failed "justabout all his science courses, and never [completed] his undergraduatework." Although he had great difficulty with his college work, it is clear that at a deeper level he was continuously absorbing the knowledge needed to revolutionize a field. As Horner tells the story, his difficult beginnings helped him to be a risk taker. " Back in the days when I was growing up, nobody knew what dyslexia was. . . . So everybody thought you were lazy or stupid or both. And I didn't think I was, but I wasn't sure. I had a lot of drive, and if somebody told me I was stupid, that usually helped--it really helped me take a lot more risks. For someone that everybody thinks is going to grow up to pump gas, you can take all the risks you want. Because if you fail, it doesn't matter.' "

But the risks paid off. According to the curator of the museum of vertebrate paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley: "A lot of people have tended to underestimate Jack because he hasn'tcome through the traditional academic route. But he is, without question, one of the two or three most important people in the world today studying dinosaurs. " Horner is able to see things differently and he observes things others do not see. For example, he believes that it is really of little interest to find the fossil bones of avery large adult dinosaur. What he is interested in finding are fossils of many dinosaurs of many sizes, in their environment, in order to understand the life of the animals and the way they interacted with other animals in that environment. Horner is known not only for his markedly different way of looking at things, but also his unusual ability to see, in the field, the tiny fossil bones of baby dinosaurs that other experts cannot find. According to another researcher: "He has a gift. . . . He can see things the rest of us don't see. "Horner is especially worth noting because, in spite of his persistent academic failures, he came eventually to be acknowledged as one who has transformed some of the fundamental thinking in his field. History forces us to reconsider in a deep fashion what is really important in one's work and what is not. Horner proved to have extraordinary difficulties with things that are largely peripheral to his discipline--reading, composition, test taking. However, he also proved to be unusually gifted in those things that lie at the heart of his discipline--being unusually observant while searching for fossil bones in the field, being able to interpret the surprising patterns that emerge from the evidence, thinking his way beyond and around his associates, developing innovative and persuasive arguments based onlooking at the raw data in a very different way.

Source: LD Online