Ten questions with Professor Stephen Wallace

 

 

1. What does innovation mean to you? 

Innovation to me is creativity. It's not simply a step change in the way that we're doing something. It's a complete change in the way that we think about something and the way that we use it.

 

2. What has been your biggest success? 

I think it's quite important not to rank your successes. It's certainly something I don't do. I think by choosing a winning success, you maybe diminish the validity of some of the other smaller successes, which I think is quite important to celebrate those as well.

 

3. What failure has helped shape you? 

When it comes to failure, I think I'm quite stubborn, because I fail all the time. In scientific research we plan an experiment, we have a hypothesis, we test it 100 times, and we fail 95 of those 100 times. Failure is something that happens all the time, is the essence of scientific research, rather than one particular failure shaping who I am today. I think perhaps the resilience that I've evolved towards failure, I think it is the most important thing. I think it's within those failures that the most important science happens.

 

4. What would your friends say your greatest strengths and weaknesses are? 

I think my friends would say that my greatest strength is my optimism. Perhaps my work hard, play hard ethic, and I'm definitely the social instigator, definitely the last one at the party. I think we worked too hard in the job that we have here to not have a little bit of fun along the way.

 

5. What book do you recommend to others? 

It would have to be Microcosm, by Carl Zimmer. It is really one of those books that was the first time when I read it was the first time I really fell in love with microorganisms and what we can do.

 

6. If you had one more hour in the day how would you spend it?

I would spend that hour figuring out how that happens and then maybe engineer that to give myself 2 hours.

 

7. What scares you?

Maybe really ruthlessly ambitious people. I think you have to work hard to succeed in what you're trying to do, but you have to at the same time, be a nice person. I think otherwise makes anything that you achieve really quite hollow.

 

8. What piece of advice has stuck with you? 

When I was growing up, my parents always told me that I could do whatever I wanted. I could be whatever I want to be, but I had to realise that I had to work really hard to get there. I think that's always stuck with me, that limitless ambition, but the realisation that it's going to come with a lot of hard work. The idea that hard work always beats talent. When talent doesn't  work hard.

 

9. What future innovation would you like to see happen in your lifetime?  

I'd love to see us completely decouple our society from this inherent reliance that we have on fossil fuels. I think there are so many environmental consequences that are quite frankly, unacceptable now, that come from this inherent reliance. I think biotechnology as an alternative to this gives us a really enticing and very elegant and sustainable alternative to this, that I would love to see happen in the next few decades.

 

10. What gives you hope?  

Science