Science, academia, and hope

I do love academia. In the week I’ve been typing out thoughts and impressions and posting them here, I’ve been negative about some aspects of my life as a post-doc. Today I was reminded today about what I find so appealing about this world. I think it’s an interesting facet of our society - the academic world. Granted, I’ve been strictly involved in the sciences, then have moved into medical applications, so I don’t have a complete picture. For example, I understand that students outside the sciences sometimes have to pay to put themselves through the miserable experience that is grad school. Hideous. And no compensation for travel expenses? Awful. Tremendous competition for jobs after graduation? Unheard of. My advice to anyone who is interested in delaying real life by completing a graduate program is to enter the sciences. My part of the academic world is a place where paid positions in research are available, travel for conferences is paid for, you get a lovely set of benefits, and where you can at least attempt to support yourself while you complete research that would be necessary to finish a thesis anyway. It’s a beautiful little system.

The job can be stressful, and medical applications, while incredibly rewarding and well-funded (comparatively, of course – nobody’s bragging about how much money they’re getting to do science right now) are sometimes riddled with confounds and problems. But when I look at my world on good days, I see brilliant people who have dedicated themselves to constantly learning. The best professors have told me that they gain a little more insight each term they teach a course. Leading research groups is a constant exercise in keeping up with literature, providing focus and nudging students in the most promising direction. Performing the studies demands careful thought, attention to detail and constant obsession over the question you're trying to answer, and how you can chip away at the problem to get closer to your goal.

Now I’m part of this world. I was talking to a friend today and he told me that it takes a long time to feel like you know what you’re doing. Years until you feel really comfortable, even in your area of expertise. You don’t always notice the mistakes in papers, present your material in the most clear way, design a study so that you answer the right questions in some reasonable way. But we make the attempt. Someone says that a current method is lacking – a group of patients die too soon or suffer too much. There’s something profound about looking at a problem and trying to solve it, most times approaching from many directions and from many disciplines in a struggle to understand, to test solutions, and to progress toward a preferrable alternative.

Disease, and the treatment thereof, is such a huge problem though. I think I get discouraged because I see how far we have to go. I remember being stuck in traffic with my mom on a trip to St. Louis to do some shopping. The arch looked so very far away, and I started to whine. So Mom continued to pick out little goals - we just wanted to get around this corner, then we just wanted to make it over the bridge, then over the hill, and eventually we had passed enough little markers that we reached the destination. I've never been good about seeing the little accomplishments though - I tend to notice how very far we seem from the arch and feel inadequate when I think about how quickly we should be trying to get there. I hear about people who are hoping for miracles, and I want to hurry. Sometimes there's just too much stuff in the way though, and you have to slow down. Going too fast, as satisfying as it is in the moment, can trick you into taking a bad detour. You have this idea, and it’s exciting and promising, but someone’s tried it already or there’s some fatal flaw. So we spend hours upon hours reading about what other people do – how they do it, their successes, their advice, implications for the field, possible problems. And some days all I see is suffering – patients with several alternatives, but none of them good. And it's frustrating to spend time reading the map when I'd rather speed toward something and hope I'm heading in the right direction.

But then I see a speaker who has traveled to be here, who’s telling us all that he can to make our programs more successful, to spark thoughts, to obtain insight into how to improve his own studies. I’ve seen it more times than I can count – seminars, questions, discussions afterward, but today it struck me as being particularly powerful. We’re trying to build careers, make money, support families, but we’re also trying to make the world better. And that effort is completely sincere – for as much as I’d like to be published and get grants funded, I believe that the desire to be relevant for a group of people who might need the help is stronger by far.

So I read the journals, and I listen to the talks. I look forward to conferences, not just for the travel – though I’ve been to Europe and Asia and traveled throughout North America – but to see what’s new and important, to talk to other scientists and discover alternatives to how I was thinking. And I sense the hope that we’re finding some critical element that might contain the answer. Or at least enough of the answer to help someone feel a little better, live a little longer, or avoid dealing with us altogether. So I'm smiling tonight, with some pride and some optimism, because a group of people who constantly strive to know more might someday know enough.