Vance Crowe Podcast 002: Dr. Doug Sammons; what it takes to be a scientist that discovers things.

About this episode

Vance interviews Dr. Doug Sammons, a chemist and enzymologist best known for discovering the mechanism of EPSP synthase — the enzyme target of glyphosate — and for decades of work at Monsanto. (Note: transcript speaker labels are swapped throughout; the person actually answering as the scientist is mislabeled "Vance Crowe" and the interviewer is mislabeled "Dr. Doug Sammons" — this analysis follows the corrected mapping used in the existing Excerpts section.) They open with the framework of the "big five" personality trait of disagreeableness, which Sammons uses to describe himself: someone who would rather resolve a problem correctly than keep a group comfortable, a trait he says has been with him since childhood ("born with my hand up"). From there the conversation moves through his winding path into biochemistry (switching from biology because it offered no jobs), the discovery process itself — including a vivid Everglades story about a professor teaching him that "the prepared mind is what sees things," the concept of consilience (proving something true from multiple independent angles), and detailed war stories from his PhD defense and early Monsanto years about learning to ask sharp, well-targeted questions rather than showy ones. Late in the conversation he turns candid about a long-standing personal handicap — being, by his own account, a genuinely poor writer despite 70 published papers, mostly written or heavily edited by mentors and coauthors — and reflects on what sacrifice he'd have made earlier if he'd understood its cost. The episode closes on social media and Twitter, where Sammons voices real ambivalence about the power of "outraged mobs" to drive change, arguing that mob-driven outrage is "destructive as opposed to constructive," even as he values the genuine connections and course-correction Twitter's disagreeable critics provide.

“I know that it is possible to get an outraged mob to be really upset about a thing and point that outrage at a group and, and try and, and try and get some kind of change there. But that's not lasting change. And really it's, it's destructive as opposed to constructive.”

“Whereas there was a while there where I thought that that was something worth striving for having the ability to do that in case you needed to. Now I think very, very poorly of that. In fact, I I, it it's, it's a level of connection on social media that not only do I wish other people didn't have, I'm, I'm pretty comfortable with even me not having it because that, that, with that sort of power to drive outrage and pointed at people, it's a dangerous power.”

Key moments

• Vance's disagreeableness framing — the value of a person who "would rather resolve an issue over having the group get along." (bubbles)
• Sammons's childhood detail — "he was born with my hand up," a lifelong trait of never being able to hold back a question.
• Sammons's Everglades story about a professor teaching him that "the prepared mind is what sees things" — the roots of his approach to scientific discovery. (craft)
• Introduction of "consilience" — proving a result true from entirely independent lines of evidence, his personal standard for confidence in a finding.
• Sammons's PhD defense story — being asked "what if that doesn't work" through plans A, B, and C, and finally having to say "I don't know."