>>13824003In my experience, getting to the cutting edge of science requires a combination of things.
First and foremost what you need is a shitton of hard work, determination, and maybe even a bit of obsession. You also need to be really interested in something. There is no way you can take all the shit uni and profs and review boards put you through, unless you are commited and genuinely curious about something. You don't need to be a genius, but you do need to be smart. Smart enought to understand the material without takeing forever, and smart enough to navigate the world of academia. This requires social smarts too, and emotional intelligence can be helpfull as well. You need to be able to maintain mental health, to know who to talk to, who to suck up to, and who to avoid. How to get a position at a well funded lab, how to get funding...
The ability to act independantly and without much help, so autonomy really, is also a major advantage.
A breakthrough or even paradigme shift doesn't come from some devine level intelligence, it comes from obsession and hard work and funding and access and luck and intelligence and probably a bunch of other things i'm just forgetting.
