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THE IMPORTANCE OF STUPIDITY IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
| Martin A. Schwartz Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA e-mail: maschwartz@virginia.edu Accepted 9 April 2008 Journal of Cell Science 121, 1771 Published by The Company of Biologists 2008 doi:10.1242/jcs.033340urnal of Cell Science | |
| I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain. For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can’t be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart. A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did. That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can. | I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It’s a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutionalor national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty. Second, we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about ‘relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t. I’m also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don’t match their talents. Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, ‘I don’t know’. The point of the exam isn’t to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it’s the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student’s weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student’s knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project. Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries. |
Task 7.Complete with suitable phrases the following extract from an essay on ‘British weather’.
The British are famous all over the world for their obsession with the weather, but in fact the reality is more complex than people often believe. This essay sets out to examine some of the principal influences on the weather of the British Isles.
............................................................................ is the geographical position of Britain, situated on the extreme western edge of the European continent. This means that a variety of weather types can dominate the country. ................................... the Atlantic Ocean can produce warm wet winds, especially in winter. .............................. the land mass of Europe can create anticyclonic weather, hot in summer and cold in winter. .................. the polar region to the north can generate cold winds at most seasons of the year.
...................................................................... variations within Britain, there are significant differences between regions. ............................... the south of England can be much warmer than the north of Scotland, especially in winter. ........................ the west of Britain is usually much wetter than the east. ........................... even in the same district, hilly areas will be cooler and wetter than the lowlands.
............................................ is seasonal change, which in Britain is less distinct than in many countries. ....................... the Atlantic moderates extreme types of weather, and ....................... the weather pattern can change radically from year to year. As a result warm days in winter and chilly summer winds frequently surprise visitors to this country.
Task 8. Read an extract of an article. Choose from the list (A-D) the phrase to connect the ideas of paragraphs.
| A | More specifically, |
| B | But there's worse. |
| C | But according |
| D | We're a gloomy lot, |
Consumerism is 'eating the future'
New Scientist, August 2009 by Andy Coghlan
We're a gloomy lot, with many of us insisting that there's nothing we can do personally about global warming, or that the human race is over-running the planet like a plague.
But according to leading ecologists speaking this week in Albuquerque at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, few of us realise that the main cause of the current environmental crisis is human nature.
More specifically, all we're doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available, just like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all the nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.
One speaker in Albuquerque, epidemiologist Warren Hern of the University of Colorado at Boulder, even likened the expansion of human cities to the growth and spread of cancer, predicting "death" of the Earth in about 2025. He points out that like the accelerated growth of a cancer, the human population has quadrupled in the past 100 years, and at this rate will reach a size in 2025 that leads to global collapse and catastrophe.
But there's worse. Not only are we simply doing what all creatures do: we're doing it better. In recent times we're doing it even faster because of changes in society that encourage and celebrate conspicuous and excessive consumption.
"Biologists have shown that it's a natural tendency of living creatures to fill up all available habitat and use up all available resources," says William Rees of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "That's what underlies Darwinian evolution, and species that do it best are the ones that survive, but we do it better than any other species," he told me prior to the conference.
Task 9. Cohesion is achieved by several methods, such as the use of conjunctions. Another is the linking of phrases and sentences with words like he, they and that which refer back to something mentioned before. Read the following paragraph and complete the table.
Jenkins (1987) has researched the life cycle of new businesses. He found that they have an average life of only 4.7 years. This is due to two main reasons; one economic and one social. The former appears to be a lack of capital, the latter a failure to carry out suf.cient market research. Jenkins considers that together these account for approximately 70% of business failures.
| Jenkins | he |
| new businesses | |
| average life of only 4.7 years | |
| one economic | |
| one social | |
| the former…, the latter… |
Task 10. Read the article and complete the table below to show what the reference words (in italic) refer to.
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