Today one of my mentors expelled a little bit of advice worth sharing – don’t forget the forest.
In research, it is incredibly easy to find ourselves thick within the weeds of science – spending hours and weeks optimizing protocols and testing antibodies or focusing on one small protein as I do each and every day.
And honestly, it can start to feel like research doesn’t matter – inspiration and initial excitement dwindling as the novelty of the project fades and we begin to really wonder what contribution we are making to the larger world around us. I like to think that I am not a stranger in that sentiment. There are much easier career paths to pursue that involve a lot less education and opportunities for failure. Yet what I have seen in my cohort of aspiring scientists is a bit of optimism. Naive optimism maybe, but optimism nonetheless to change the world around us. To discover something previously unknown, to seek out answers to the problems that still exist everywhere we look, to be able to close our eyes and think about ways we can make a contribution to this world we call home.
Yet there are roadblocks to this beautiful mentality that has been cultivated in these young aspiring truthseekers. One being that funding doesn’t exist to solve all of the problems we wish to solve, and another being simply that there is actually still so much left to be discovered that we cannot even begin to piece together this full truth until we nitpick our way through the minutiae.
Rather than curing cancer, we find that cancer has so many facets to it that we could spend our whole life focusing on one oncogene and still have more to learn. Rather than fixing climate change, we find that there are so many sources of pollution and so many cultural, societal, and environmental aspects that this singular problem suddenly morphs into hundreds of issues – many of which we as individuals are powerless to fix. And even with my current project on innate immunity – as soon as I feel like I am beginning to decipher the function of interferon-alpha1, I realize there is yet another aspect I have not considered from binding affinity to posttranslational modifications to receptor internalization.
Nothing is as straightforward as textbooks make it seem, and this is how we then begin to start staring at trees and picking up weeds rather than looking at the forest – the big picture.
Yet the forest is essential in continuing to fuel that sense of optimism and inspiration that led me to this field in the first place. As soon as we begin to forget what we are working towards is when research and our day-to-day begins to look a little more dismal. We must not forget the opportunity we have to actually leave a little bit to the next generation via knowledge and to seek out truth in a world that can be so uncertain.
You, my reader, may see me as a naive optimist, and honestly, you are probably right. But imagine what we could accomplish in a world full of individuals still driven by hope.
There are real issues. Science is not always collaborative but rather can seem like a rat race of lone individuals seeking out what new morsel of information they can extract to publish in a good journal, garner citations, and provide credibility to their name. Rather than share insight on procedures and insight, many hold onto their data more tightly than their social security information. And yet, the naive optimist in me believes that change can still occur.
It it the profound weight that is put on the shoulders of a scientist to produce – to manifest new and novel information constantly that leads to the need to focus on the minutiae and to live a life in the weeds.
But everyone needs to take just a brief minute to come up for air and take flight above the trees to explore the forest. We must simply remember why we all chose this path in the first place and what problems we are all working together to tackle. Great strides have been made in so many facets of science over a few mere decades, and remembering that these small pieces of information come together to form an astounding puzzle of life is what will continue to give us the strength to prevail and continue our search for answers.
Don’t be so stuck in the trees that you forget the forest.
Megen's Musings 