What's it like to be a scientist?

Have you ever had a question you wanted to know the answer to (before Quora)? Science is answering that question yourself. You get both the satisfaction of finding the truth, with the satisfaction of knowing you did it yourself. Doing that for a career, where every day you answer questions? That's an awesome feeling. Being a scientist is unlocking the mysteries of the universe one by one. It is reaching out and grasping Reality in ways no other field can let you. It is the study of Truth, pure and simple and untainted. I think the 8-year old scientists of Blackawton Primary School said it best: "Science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.” http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/kids-study-bees/ What is being a scientist like? Awesome. Just plain awesome.

It's confusing. Both Feynman and Bethe also noted this, especially in early stage discovery, where you may be the only one with a new thought like Bethe noted when he came up with nuclear fusion as the way the Sun and stars are powered. Feynman is on old video noting confusion and he compares himself to then animal behavior studies on how monkeys figure out to use tools to reach a banana (and he's the monkey, and he occasionally gets enlightenment (rarely)). Then comes the transmission and communication time. If you are lucky and its simple and easily, you tell others verbally or in a peer reviewed paper. But most are not so lucky. You have to work against prevailing opinion and ideas. A few rare individuals don't have to fight. They have very compelling ideas which fit neatly into observation, etc. Leo Szilard noted 3 stages which include not only denial (you have to be able to convince everyone "including the janitor" (T.J. Watson also cited "janitor")), but the 3rd stage was "We knew it all along." Others noted this as well. For a lucky few, some get to be very happy and/or rich. But very few.

tedious, most of the time. terrifying when you realize there is no guarantee your work will succeed. the greatest joy in all the world when you understand something that no one else has been able to recognize and crack. there is a line somewhere in pynchon's against the day, about that space of time where i think the man who discovered or invented or crafted quaternions understood them and realized that no one in the universe until that moment did, but this was being told in a 100 year gathering of his children, so to speak. the hard parts of being a scientist are (1) only other scientists are interested, and only those in your field of specialization probably understand you, and unless they've spent as much time as you thinking about it, are not going to be able to push back and help you. so it is very isolating outside of your lab. if you family is outside that sphere, it can make for tension in the relationship, to be honest. why, because except for very few special peope like feyman or koch down in pasadena, scientists strike embodied folk as dull as dishwater. i don't climg mountains and i don't enjoy running with the bulls in madrid. that kind of thing. (2) it is fiercely competitive and not for the weak of heart. you have to be very strong minded to do science. i mean, to do research. it's all cognitive and your body needs attention to, and it's hard to remember that.

Science jobs are diverse. Some scientists spend much of their time in the lab or field whereas others work in offices. Most of my science career was as a bench scientist. My field was the biopsychology of food and fluid intake. I sometimes had an assistant but always did much of the lab work myself. I conducted experiments involving laboratory rats and mice. Many of the tasks were repetitive and a bit dull like weighing the animals and what they ate. Other tasks like administering drugs, surgery, and chemical assays started out as interesting until they became repetitive and dull. Even something as cool as extracting hypothalamic estradiol receptors got dull after a while. I had to care for animal health. Sick animals produce bad data and nobody wants that. Some of the treatments I used, like diabetes, made my animals sick. I performed statistical analyses. In the old days that involved paper spreadsheets. When computers started becoming less costly, I wrote my own code to collect and analyze data. I taught myself several computer languages. I also became proficient with designing and building electrical devices that interfaced with computers. On occasion, I spent a Sunday afternoon fixing a computerized device that had chosen to break down at that time. I got to be good at using a Swiss army knife to adjust homemade operational amplifier circuits. I also prepared specialized diets for my lab animals. Mixed dusty powders containing all the nutrients an animal needs. My lab coats were often dirty even though they were washed frequently. Most scientists spend a lot of time writing. I wrote reports for publication in journals or books, corresponded with the editors and referees, and wrote too many grant applications begging for money from NIH or NSF. I also attended meetings where I both learned what others did and presented my own work. Occasionally, my presentations were well received. From time to time, journals sent me articles to evaluate. I studied them, located typos,  logical errors, and missing information and wrote reports for the journal editor. I spent a lot of time reading. I used a publication called current contents which listed the table of contents for the latest editions of journals. I then wrote to the authors of the studies asking for copies of their journal articles. Each day, I went through the articles the authors sent me looking for ideas that would advance my own work. I also sent copies of my own articles to scientists who asked for them. If I got new ideas on research topics, it became time to go to the biomedical library to hunt up articles on the topics I hadn't previously considered. I spent a lot of time xeroxing articles so I could study them at my leisure. If that didn't lead me to change my research, the library work occasionally that led me to write a review paper so others could benefit from what I found. From time to time, I advised people in the food and flavor industry about developments in the field and how that might affect the marketplace. I worked briefly as an administrator at NIH. Didn't spend any time in the lab. Talked with other administrators and read topics, like immunology, that I hadn't previously studied. Sometimes attended presentations by active scientists. Spent a lot of time sitting down. I much preferred pipetting plasma samples into test tubes so I could measure free fatty acid levels. I don't do that anymore. The computer skills I developed led to a new career. There is one more thing to add. It is really thrilling to have a hypothesis clearly confirmed or dis-confirmed so that now you know something you didn't know before and the effort was worthwhile.

For most people, science jobs are a calling: they love doing the actual science work, and cope with the pieces they like less. In a lot of places, science nowadays comes with the obligation to fight continuously for funding; this part and the associated administration are often the least liked parts. One of the greatest feelings of science is when you come to insights that nobody has had before. My job is not very typical for science work: I am an organizer of life science projects involving more and more computer readable data. I am working between Dutch academic organisations, talk a lot with people, trying to bring those together that have similar goals to see if they can reach them together.

I have been working as a research scientist (a molecular biologist) for the past 12 years and the one thing I like the most about it is that I can create something new every single day. I have the freedom to think and question available theories and dogmas and the capacity to test my ideas and revise them based on new evidence. I also like being able to wear many hats. Some days I read scientific papers, on some days I write them myself. Some days are devoted full time for designing experiments at the bench or performing them and some days are devoted to making sense of my data or coming up with new hypotheses. Like everything else, being a scientist has its cons but for me the pros outweigh them. Please feel free to read more on this topic in my blog http://phdplus3.com