January Journal: Science!
Jan. 2nd, 2014 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livajollypyruvate asked me about Science! Why science? Also, is science awesome? Or what?
My reasons for pursuing science as a career are not the most absolutely typical reasons, at least not compared to surveys of why people become scientists. A lot of people say they got into science because they liked having a definite right answer which is objective, or because they found the scientific method to be so powerful as a way of finding the truth. Sometimes they also mention that they were fascinated by dinosaurs or space rockets from childhood. None of those reasons is completely irrelevant to my attraction to science, but they're rather secondary. For me, the main reason why I chose science at university and then continued into a research career is that I experience science as an endlessly fascinating story. I want to know how things work, and how all the complex components interact to give the biology we can observe. There's always more I want to find out, I can never feel satisfied that ok, I know the answer now. I don't believe science is more true than anything else, I don't think that because people have done controlled experiments their conclusions must be right and immutable, but I find it more interesting than almost anything else.
Many people are surprised when I say I chose science because it's such a good story; they expect people who love stories as much as I do to go into something more literary, or history or journalism. It's also the case that when people do psychometric tests and describe the typical personality or Myers-Briggs type or what have you for a scientist, I don't really fit the mould. That's partly because people say science and really mean physics, with biology just squeaking in under the definition of a hard science because it does just about involve performing experiments to elucidate objective facts about the natural world. I think it may also be partly because I'm in fact not typical of the sort of person who goes into science, at least to an extent.
In other ways, of course, my reasons for pursuing science were in fact entirely typical. They're just not the reasons people usually pick as the answer to the why question. I became a scientist because I was brought up and educated in an environment where scientists are respected and I had plenty of scientist role models. I kept pursuing science to more and more advanced levels precisely because I'm good at it. I generally find scientific explanations easy to grasp, and I am good at both remembering scientific detail and synthesizing lots of disparate facts into an overall mechanism. I'm also quite unconfident at literary analysis and that's a major component of at least the early part of most non-science academic paths. (I'm worse than average at most practical skills and better than average at most intellectual skills, and that combined with an upbringing that greatly values intellectual skills over practical skills anyway meant that I was always going to do something primarily intellectual.) I drifted towards science because it's academically hard, and I'm clever, and I got lots of praise for doing something well that's considered hard.
Most of the rest of the reasons explain more why I ended up in this particular subfield, rather than why I chose science in general. My mother was a biologist, and I was fascinated by genetics from a young age. As a teenager my favourite subject was chemistry and I reckoned that the most interesting chemistry was the biological kind. My best friend and some sensible teachers persuaded me that I ought to take biology A Level even though I didn't really enjoy most of biology at GCSE, and it did in fact turn out that A Level biology has a much higher proportion of the kind of molecular stuff I find interesting compared to the sort of mostly nature studies stuff that I found boring in more elementary biology. I read biochemistry at Oxford because I wanted to go to Oxford and they didn't offer my preferred option of either biological chemistry or a more narrow course like genetics. I wasn't at the time intending to become a scientist, I wanted to be a teacher, but I learned that biochemistry is more interesting than I realized – I wanted to find out the next instalment of the story – and that it's possible to be a teacher as a career academic, without necessarily being a schoolteacher.
The big thing that changed my mind was doing a summer programme at the Weizmann Institute for Science in Israel, as much as anything because I wanted a chance to do a summer residential stint in a cool foreign country and gain CV points. I worked in the lab of Moshe Oren and fell in love with p53 and programmed cell death. That in turn led me to be very excited to hear David Lane when he came to speak at Oxford, and I asked him if he was looking for a PhD student, which indeed he was. It's a bit hard to explain why I like this particular aspect of molecular cell biology, cell fate regulation, so much; a lot of people assume it's because I altruistically want to help find the cure for cancer, and of course I do want to help to find better treatments for cancer, and I do like having a career which seems worthwhile. Mostly, though, I just find it really really interesting. The thing that really grabs me about it is the combination of a lot of detail (I'm much more detail oriented than big-picture oriented), with something that fits together to make a logical, well, story, cells reacting to a whole web of different influences and situations and stimuli and ultimately "deciding" whether to divide or die. The other field that has just this level of masses and masses of detail that somehow fits together and make sense is developmental biology and I was put off that mainly because I'm squeamish about animal experiments, really.
Is science awesome? Well, yes it is, it makes it possible to understand the world in depth and with accuracy that could never be achieved by non-systematic observation or by just thinking about it. I personally really enjoy designing experiments, thinking of the controls I'll need to eliminate other possible explanations for the same data, notably just random chance. And I really like troubleshooting in the most systematic way possible, something I do all the time even when I'm not actually at the bench doing official experiments. To be honest I like designing and interpreting experiments probably more than I like doing experiments, in most cases. However I'm rather suspicious of the science / "rationality" fans who elevate Science to an unrealistic, quasi-religious level. Science is not magically more objective (let alone more true) than any other field, like everything else it's subject to politics and normal human foibles including self-interest. Indeed, for me the most awesome thing about science is its very humility, the fact that the best science is always open to criticism. A truly scientific conclusion is not one that is perfectly true because it's been "proved" with an experiment, it's one that can always be re-evaluated with new data.
Also, the idea that "science is awesome" kind of blurs two definitions of science. There's science as in the specific facts that fall within the domain of the subject called science. Those facts aren't particularly more awesome than any other facts. I just happen to be really really excited about certain aspects of cancer cell signalling, but I don't claim that those facts are inherently more interesting than facts about history or economics or art or whatever. There's also science as in using the scientific method, which is indeed awesome, it's a really powerful tool. It's not however the only possible tool to use in any situations, and indeed not all facts-about-science are really derived from truly scientific investigations. Many are just popular beliefs that happen to use vaguely sciencey terminology, or are based on incomplete or incorrect science.
For me, science is awesome not because it gives you the true, objective right answer, but precisely because it's all about discovering new concepts. And discovery often means questioning, even overturning previous understandings, including things held to be scientifically accurate. Why science? Because science celebrates and revels in what is uncertain and unknown. Science is an always-unfolding story, I love not knowing what will happen when I try a particular experiment, and I love that no-one else knows either. It's not a matter of finding The Answer that will be pleasing to authority or show my superiority over a mere lay person, it's approaching the world with an attitude of curiosity about what even the cleverest people who have ever lived don't know.
[January Journal masterlist; there's still quite a few spaces so do feel free to add some more prompts even if you didn't get to it in December! Or indeed to make a second request if you're already in the list.]
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-02 11:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-03 02:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-03 12:44 pm (UTC)I vaguely entertained the idea as a teenager that I might want to be famous, but it was never a major motivation for me. I didn't want certainty, though, I wanted to explore the unknown. I think perhaps I was mistaken in believing that science would continue to earn me praise for being good at the subject, because being a scientist results in far more criticism than praise.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-05 10:03 pm (UTC)Southernwood