First the musings. Thinking is to scientists as swimming is to sharks. If a shark stops swimming it will sink, and if it doesn't have the ability to pump water over its gills or get water through spiracles, it will suffocate. If a scientist stops thinking, they will sink. Maybe not quickly, but eventually they will find themselves at the bottom. This should not surprise anyone. However, as scientists-in-training, graduate students must deliberately foster and feed this skill.
It is possible, as a graduate student, to make it through your graduate career and get a Ph.D. without learning to think well. You often spend much of your time troubleshooting one system, one protocol, one detail. While this is important, one can forget the bigger picture. To survive as a PI, one must have larger ideas, connecting themes from different subdisciplines. So, the challenge to all you grad students out there, including myself, is to keep thinking critically. Don't lose the forest for the trees.
That said, there have been a couple of articles released that I'm interested in discussing here. One was recently published in PNAS that all my immunologist friends will enjoy. The other two articles were published in Science and approach the same scientific problem with different techniques and tell different stories. That post will be a compare/contrast that will take some time.
Lastly, I'd like to make some of my posts in video format. Let me know what you're interested in seeing. Should it be sports, science, or soul related? Until the next post...
No comments:
Post a Comment