Robert Proctor on specialization

Excerpt from Discover, January 2009.

An interview by Michael Abrams:

You work in such widely different fields.  Why don’t you choose a specialty?

Something is lost when people specialize. I like to see things like an amateur. The word amateur is literally “lover”,  it’s from amore. Professionalism is often the death of intellectual inquiry. So I think there’s a kind of virtue of systematic amateurism that really needs to be rekindled. If you don’t love and hate and play and joke with your objects of study, then you’re really not treating them properly. I tell my students if you’re not angry and excited and enthralled by your topic, you should choose a different one.