Part 2: Where Curiosity Begins

In our first article, The People Behind the Prize, we looked at some of the qualities that stood out as we explored the lives of extraordinary scientists and interacted with several of them through Open Ideas Lab. But while reading their biographies, we kept finding ourselves drawn further back beyond the laboratories, universities and eventual breakthroughs, to a much earlier part of their lives. What were they like before they became scientists? What occupied their attention as children? And what happened to those early interests along the way?

One story that stayed with us was that of Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms. His childhood account is striking precisely because it is so ordinary. His explorations of the technical world began with Lego, building moving objects from the simple pieces available at the time. He experimented with electricity kits, repaired household appliances, used his father's tools for woodworking, conducted chemistry experiments in the basement, and took apart old radios and a television. What fascinated him was not simply assembling things. He wanted to understand how they worked and he became frustrated when the instructions told him what to do without explaining what was happening underneath.

Looking back at that story, it is tempting to draw a straight line from Lego to the Nobel Prize. Real lives are rarely that neat. Ketterle could not possibly have known where those childhood experiments would eventually lead. What we find interesting is something much simpler: he had the freedom to follow an interest deeply. He could build something, become dissatisfied with the explanation, take it apart, experiment, and try to understand it for himself. The activity was not designed as an educational exercise. There was no learning objective attached to it. It was simply something he wanted to figure out.

As we looked across the childhood stories of other Nobel Laureates and great scientists, we found this pattern appearing in different forms. Among physicists in particular, there were numerous accounts of children fascinated by mechanisms - radios, electronics, model aeroplanes, machines and things that could be built or dismantled. Among many future biologists and medical scientists, the objects of fascination were more often living things: insects, animals, plants and the natural world. The subjects varied, but there was a common tendency to spend considerable time observing something and trying to understand it before anyone had asked them to do so.

That distinction matters because childhood curiosity rarely looks like what we later call "scientific ability." A child watching insects in the garden is not conducting an experiment in the formal sense. A child dismantling a radio may simply be making a mess. A child building elaborate Lego structures may have no interest whatsoever in becoming an engineer. Yet these activities can provide something that formal education sometimes struggles to reproduce: the freedom to follow a question wherever it leads.

And there is another important feature of these stories. The interest often came long before the formal education. The child was already exploring; school later provided the vocabulary, mathematics, concepts and discipline to take that exploration further. This is not an argument against education - quite the opposite. Great education can transform an instinctive interest into genuine capability. But it suggests that education works best when it builds on something that is already alive in the student.

This is particularly relevant for parents. We naturally want to give children every advantage, and today that can easily translate into more classes, more activities, more structured learning and more pressure to demonstrate achievement. Yet the childhood stories of many great scientists raise a different possibility: perhaps some of the most valuable experiences are those in which there is no predetermined outcome. Time spent building something without instructions, observing nature without an assignment, reading beyond the curriculum, experimenting with an idea or simply pursuing an unusual interest can teach children to become comfortable with uncertainty.

That ability becomes increasingly important as they grow older. In school, students are often presented with problems where someone already knows the answer. In research and innovation, the most interesting problems are usually the opposite. The answer is uncertain, the information is incomplete, and the first idea may fail. The person who has learned to investigate rather than simply seek the correct answer is better prepared for that world.

This is one reason we have designed Open Ideas Lab around real-world challenges. We want young people to experience the difference between answering a question and figuring out what the right question might be. When students work on a challenge involving climate, health, technology, space or their own communities, there may not be a neat solution waiting for them. They have to explore the problem, find information, question assumptions, develop an idea and discover its weaknesses. The process is much closer to how real innovation happens.

Our Save Mumbai 2050 initiative is one example. Students are not being asked to reproduce an answer from a textbook. They are being invited to think about how a city can remain safe, liveable and prosperous in the face of climate change and other pressures. The questions are difficult precisely because there is no single correct answer. That uncertainty can be uncomfortable, but it is also where meaningful thinking begins.

There is an important lesson here for educators too. We do not need to turn every childhood interest into a STEM activity. Nor should every hobby be evaluated for its future usefulness. The more valuable question may be whether children are being given enough opportunities to become deeply interested in something. A child does not need to know that an interest in insects could eventually lead to biology, or that fascination with electronics could lead to physics or engineering. The connection may only become visible decades later - if it becomes visible at all.

Perhaps that is why Ketterle's childhood story is so compelling. The Lego, the radios, the chemistry experiments and the woodworking were not early versions of his Nobel-winning research. They were simply the things that interested him at the time. His parents supported those interests, and he continued exploring. The significance of those experiences only becomes apparent when we look backwards from the person he eventually became.

That is also a useful caution when we talk about successful people. Once someone has won a Nobel Prize, it is easy to look backwards and treat every childhood detail as evidence of future greatness. We should resist that temptation. Millions of children take things apart, collect insects, build models and spend hours absorbed in their own interests without becoming Nobel Laureates and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The value of curiosity is not that it guarantees extraordinary achievement. Its value is that it teaches a young person to engage with the world actively. To notice. To question. To investigate. To make connections. To become comfortable with not knowing.

And perhaps that is the real lesson we take from these childhood stories. We cannot predict which child will become a Nobel Laureate, an inventor, a scientist or an entrepreneur. What we can do is create environments in which children have the freedom to explore before they have to decide what they want to become.

At Open Ideas Lab, this is one of the principles behind what we are trying to build. We want to give young people opportunities to move from curiosity to questions, from questions to ideas, and from ideas to experimentation. Not every idea will work. Not every student will become an innovator. That is not the point. The point is to give them the opportunity to find out what happens when they take an idea seriously.

And perhaps somewhere, a child is already doing exactly that right now - building something from Lego, watching an insect, taking apart an old device or asking a question that seems insignificant to everyone else. We may never know where that question leads.

But we should be careful not to interrupt the exploration simply because we cannot yet see the destination.

In Part 3, we explore the hidden creative lives of extraordinary scientists and what they might tell us about how innovation really works.