An observation about his approach to science, which I thought was distinctive: he was interested in a big, fuzzy relationship- health and stress. Over the course of his career, his lab wrote hundreds of small, credible papers to fill out and explore this relationship. Few were in the big journals, but over time, a sort of broadly understood relationship emerged and many other labs also participated in developing this concept. Now it’s just sort of something we understand- it’s a robust concept.

His approach always struck as significantly different from the one or two big nature/science papers that claims to discover or demonstrate a fundamental relationship. These tour de force papers can be vital, and they can also mislead an entire field.

I appreciated Bruce’s approach, especially because the incentive structure that permeated my graduate experience was “go big or go home”. There are entire classes of Scientific insight that won’t be revealed if this is this approach dominates.