The thrill of experimentation

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One of the fascinating things about science, and the reason I pursued a scientific rather than a medical career, is the scientific process. When I was an undergraduate, I worked in laboratories and was exposed to the daily life of a scientist. That is, you can go in, design experiments, get the results, look at those results and start to think about their implications. You’re the first person to see those results. This generates lots of ideas in your head, and you have to then come up with different ways of testing those ideas.

A critical component of being a great scientist is choosing which ideas to pursue, because you can go down the wrong path very easily if you’re not smart enough to figure out what the data is telling you and where to go with it.

Mystics in the laboratory

One of my former colleagues, Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock, used to say: Look at the material. In her case, she worked on corn. She used to look at the plant cells and chromosomes she was studying and let them talk to her. She was almost mystic in that sense.

Scientists are like this. They have a passion, a willingness to try to understand what has not been understood before.

That’s what I really like about science. It’s not only about breaking new ground but challenging new ideas on a daily basis and looking at data that is constantly changing. The questions that I asked when I was a graduate student or a PhD student, or then later as a scientist with my own laboratory, are completely different from one another in the bigger picture. We’re trying to solve a particular problem in biology that is genetic inheritance, but the details and the experimental system that you’re using change all the time.

The other wonderful thing about science is that you have colleagues in your institution who are all very different and come from an extraordinarily vast array of backgrounds. In my own laboratory, I have people from Bangladesh, from India, from China, from Taiwan and from the United States. I’m from Australia originally. We’re a mix of people from different backgrounds and with different ideas.

The innocence of youth?

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Of course, we are all working on results produced by our scientific predecessors. Some of them are giants of science, and we have to take that history into account. However, most young people, when they first go to college and later do graduate work, don’t really understand that history. They bring in new ideas. They’re not full of dogma. They come in and ask completely naïve questions, many of which have been answered before. Senior scientists can say, well, go and read this paper; it’s already been addressed. But sometimes students ask challenging questions that really make you think and say to yourself, well, that’s an interesting idea. That leads the student to go on and develop a thesis on a completely new area of science.

Of course, during that period of training, they find out that a lot of the things they thought were not done have been done by their peers and predecessors. This is part of the learning process. One of the great things about science is this constant influx of younger people who are studying science, bringing these new ideas and challenging the way things are. Someone like me, who’s been in science for over 40 years, is constantly being refreshed by these younger people coming in with new ideas, as well as by colleagues in my institution.

Science vs. history

Much like science, studying history can be a process of investigation. You look at the data, i.e. the historical material, and try to interpret what people were thinking or how movements occurred.

It’s the same with science. The difference is that scientists have this influx of young people. You’re constantly getting new material and new knowledge that is different from the existing knowledge that historians study. You shouldn’t think that everything that has been done before is correct; you need to challenge previous ideas and also look at the material that you’re working on. This tells you where to go along the discovery path.

The other difference is that young scientists come in without knowing the history of science. That’s a good thing, because they bring new ideas. Eventually, of course, they should read the literature and understand the history of their field so that they can appreciate what has been done before and what has not.

Some questions may have been asked 30 years ago, but the technologies were not there to answer them. Suddenly, 30 years later, we have technologies that can answer these very important questions. Understanding the history of what has been published can be very informative, because it gives you ideas. Reading and talking to people is another way that scientists generate ideas – and it is new ideas that are effectively the lifeblood of great science.

Finding a recipe for success

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The scientific process is all about coming up with ideas, testing those ideas with experiments (at least in experimental science), looking at the data, trying to interpret it and then coming up with a hypothesis about how things might be working. That sums up what’s great about science. However, one can devise ideas, not have the technology to be able to address them and go for many months, or sometimes years, without making a lot of progress.

A good scientist needs to know when to drop an idea and move in a different path. You can spend a long time doing experiments that don’t work, but if you look at your experimental process, you can then devise a way around it that can lead to insights and major discoveries.

The art of being a good scientist, therefore, is to not simply stick to one “recipe”, but to be like an innovative chef in a restaurant and experiment with different recipes until you find one that works spectacularly well, and which gives you new data and insights.

Passion, tenacity and common sense

Science is a process that can be frustrating, but it’s also one that is very informative if you know how to do it properly. That’s one of the exciting things about science. Some students come in and think to themselves, OK, I can just do this, this and this and get a thesis – but if that were the way science was done, we would know everything, and you wouldn’t be doing research. You would just be churning out the same results that someone else has obtained before, like following recipes in a cookbook.

Developments in science happen because of people with passion who have the tenacity to keep going with a problem – but also the sense, if necessary, to move in a different path, choose a different experimental organism or a different technique to attack the problem. You don’t want to get bogged down trying to do the same thing over and over again. Success in science means making new discoveries, appreciating the wonderful things about nature, understanding them and then being able to reconstruct the process.

Weighing up the paths

I and many top scientists have spent our entire career investigating biology and trying to figure out what’s going on. This is a process that you do day in, day out, year after year, accumulating knowledge. It’s what keeps you going.

The endgame is to try and solve a very large biological problem. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my career. My colleagues around the world have contributed enormously as well. New problems come up all of the time, and a single discovery can open up a whole bunch of ideas and new doors to follow. Being a good scientist means weighing up the paths and trying to figure out the best ones to follow.

Also, if you go down one path, how much time do you spend on it before you give up and go down a different one? Because you can go down the wrong path and spend your entire career getting nowhere, which can be very frustrating, disappointing and unrewarding. So you need to choose the questions carefully, choose the path carefully and think about how much time you’re going to spend on a particular problem. That’s really the art of being a scientist. It’s a fantastic career, but it does have its challenges.

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The pleasures and frustrations of science

Stilllman, B. (2017). "President's Message". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 2016 Annual Report: Executive Summary. 2–6.

Stillman, B. (2018). Histone Modifications: Insights into Their Influence on Gene Expression. Cell, 175(1), 6–9.

The art of being a scientist