The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions

Being curious and obsessed can lead to interesting places

Photo by Justin Heap on Unsplash

Let me start here with a story about deep, obsessive curiosity.

Back in 1964, the microbiologist Thomas Brock visited Yellowstone National Park to do some sightseeing. He was on a long car ride, and wanted to break up the monotony.

While peering into the hot springs, he noticed a curious blue-green tinge. When he asked a park ranger about it, he was told it was algae. That surprised Brock: Those pools are so hot that some of them reach a boiling temperature. At the time, scientists didn’t know of many lifeforms that could readily thrive such scalding environments.

But Brock couldn’t stop wondering about what exactly was going on in those boiling pools. He was dying to know: What was alive down there? How was it surviving?

So he spent the next six years revisiting Yellowstone and taking samples from pools, geysers, and vents. And along with his colleague Hudson Freeze, he discovered a species — Thermus aquaticus — that was previously unknown.

Essentially, they’d documented the category now known as “extremophiles”. As they wrote in a 1967 paper that hit the scientific world like an earthquake, “It is thus impossible to conclude that…