Published: Sep 14, 2014 by Gavin
Please describe what you consider your most significant accomplishment as a research scientist.
This seemingly simple question posed on a job application I completed recently had me stumped when I first came across it. What in my seven year research career has been my most significant accomplishment? I haven’t done anything that will be earning me a Nobel Prize or a paper in Science or Nature*. That isn’t to say that I haven’t done any interesting research – I would argue that my work has generally been quite interesting – just that no single project stands out as my greatest accomplishment.
By chance, I had read Ignorance, How It Drives Science by Professor Stuart Firestein, a book about the role that ignorance plays in scientific research. Prof. Firestein’s argument is that while the media and most courses portray science as the pursuit and collection of facts, it is ignorance (that is, the things we don’t know) that drives science research. He likens the research process to searching for a black cat in a dark room and we aren’t even sure if there is a cat in the room. To continue with the metaphor, once we exhaust the search of the dark room, whether we found a cat or not in that room isn’t the most important discovery, but instead the other dark rooms it leads us to. More plainly, what drives scientific research isn’t the facts that are uncovered in a particular project, but the new areas we learn we don’t understand (or to use Prof. Firestein’s terminology, the ignorance we generate). While all scientific research should answer a question (or at least attempt to), it should also create new questions out of the things it has uncovered.
While I had previously thought about the new questions that are posed by my research, I tended to focus instead on the questions that it answered. Obviously, clearly describing the questions answered is important when sharing research results with your colleagues; if you can’t do that no one else will be able to use your work, let alone understand it. However, thinking more broadly of a project as a whole, I believe it is valuable to look at research projects through the lens of what unknowns they have uncovered and what new questions are posed.
After some thought, I realised that I already knew the answer for this application. Looking back at the research projects I have participated in, the one that generated the most ignorance was my doctoral thesis. In fact, it created enough questions that I spent nearly five pages outlining them in my concluding chapter (although I called it “Future Work” at the time). In retrospect, I think that this is part of the reason I enjoyed that project as much as I did. I had reached a point that seemed like a logical place to stop and write up the work, but I never felt like I had completed the project. There was always a list of things that I could do to continue the research and despite working on it for more than four years, the list never got shorter. This, I think, is the essence of Prof. Firestein’s theory; as I worked on this project, it wasn’t the facts I collected that drove the research, but the ignorance I uncovered.
* Although when my PhD supervisor presented my research at a conference, one of the editors from the then new Nature Chemistry journal found it significant enough to ask him to write about it for their In Your Element column.