Advice to a Young Scientist

Peter Medawar

TL;DR: Scientists are all different, what unites them is the pursuit of truth through criticism and experiment. Work on important but soluble problems that matter. Don’t over-prepare; learn what you need by doing and under pressure, and focus on getting results. Keep learning through your life, share your knowledge freely, and doubt your own convictions.

Quotes

Introduction

Self-quoting his other book, The Art of the Soluble:

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.

Chapter 3 (What Shall I do Research On?)

It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be “interesting”–almost any problem is interesting if it is studied in sufficient depth.

… the problem must be such that it matters what the answer is – whether to science generally or to mankind.

Isolation is disagreeable and bad for graduate students. The need to avoid it is one of the best arguments for joining some intellectually bustling concern.

This is where I disagree (at least with the “no account” bit – I wouldn’t be so categorical):

After graduate students have taken their PhDs, they must on no account continue with their PhD work for the remainder of their lives, easy and tempting though it is to tie up loose ends and wander down attractive byways. Many successful scientists try their hands at a great many different things before they settle upon a main line of investigation,…

Chapter 4 (*How Can I Equip Myself to Be a Scientist or a Better One?)

… a novice may easily be frightened into postponing research in order to carry on with the process of “equipping himself”… this process of “equipping oneself” has no predeterminable limits and is bad psychological policy…

The great incentive to learning a new skill or supporting discipline is an urgent need to use it. For this reason, very many scientists (I certainly among them) do not learn new skills or master new disciplines until the pressure is upon them to do so; thereupon they can be mastered pretty quickly. It is the lack of this pressure on those who are forever “equipping themselves” and who show an ominous tendency to become “night-class habitues” that sometimes makes them tired and despondent in spite of all their diplomas and certificates of proficiency.

On reading:

Too much book learning may crab and confine the imagination, and endless poring over the research of others is sometimes psychologically a research substitute, much as reading romantic fiction may be a substitute for real-life romance. Scientists take very different views about “the literature”; some read very little, relying upon viva voce information, circulated “preprints”, …

The beginner must read, but intently and choosily and not too much. Few sights are sadder than that of a young research worker always to be seen hunched over journals in the library; by far the best way to become proficient in research is go get on with it – if need be, asking for help so insistently that in the long run it is easier for a colleague to help a novice than to think up excuses for not doing so.

It is psychologically most important to get results, even if they are not original. Getting results, even by repeating another’s work, brings with it a great accession of self-confidence;…

… that there would always be gaps and shortcomings in their knowledge and that to be any good they would have to go on learning all their lives. I do not know any scientist of any age who does not exult in the opportunity continuously to learn.

On solubility

Very often a solution turns on devising some means of quantifying phenomena or states that have hitherto been asserted in terms of “rather more”, “rather less”, or “a lot of”, or – sturdiest workhorse of scientific literature – “marked” (“The injection elicited a marked reaction”). Quantification as such has no merit except insofar as it helps to solve problems. To quantify is not to be a scientist, but goodness, it does help.

Chapter 5 (Sexism and Racism in Science)

… they prosper who are energetic, intelligent, “dedicated” and hardworking, but languish who are lazy, unimaginative, or dull.

Chapter 6 (Aspects of Scientific Life and Manners)

Synergism is the key word in collaboration – it connotes that the joint effort is greater than the sum of the several contributors to it – but collaboration is not obligatory, no matter how many pompous pronouncements may be made on the supersession of the individual by the team. Collaboration is a joy when it works, but many scientists can and many do get on very well as loners.

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.

A scientist’s or other research worker’s need for tranquility …

One of the most comically endearing traits of a young research worker is the illusion that everyone else is eager to hurry off to do this research before he can. In reality, his colleagues want to do their own research, not his. A scientist who is too cagey or suspicious to tell his colleagues anything will soon find that he himself learns nothing in return.

The agreed house rule… I have always worked with has always been “Tell everyone everything you know”; and I don’t know anyone who came to any harm by falling in with it.

Another dirty trick is to cite only the most recent of a long string of scientific papers written by authors to whom you are indebted, while citations of your own research go back for years and years. It is a discreditable – indeed, an unforgivable – trick of scientmanship that withholds from a published paper some details of technique to prevent someone else from taking up the story where its author left off or alternatively to prevent someone else from proving that his story is pure science fiction.

Chapter 7 (Of Younger and Older Scientists)

Excess of confidence in the rightness of their own views is a sort of senile hubris, as offensive in older scientists as excess of hubris in the young.

On science and administration:

Service on committees and other extramural distractions should never be used as an excuse for not doing research, for that is the scientist’s first business. I know no good scientist who makes such excuses – only bad ones.

… “I never seem to get any time for thinking nowadays”. I found this remark puzzling because it did not seem to me to be possible to apportion a time for thinking, as for playing squash, dining, or having a drink. What they meant was that they had no time for reading of cognate but not directly relevant scientific literature, for reflection, for the unhurried musing over experimental results – their own and others’ – looking for unsuspected sources of error and wondering upon the new directions the research might take. A scientist who is deeply preoccupied with the solution of a problem will find not so much that he allocates special times to thinking about it but rather that reflection upon the problem is the equilibrium state or the zero point on the dial to which his mind tends automatically to return when it is not occupied by anything else. Indeed, when a scientist without administrative responsibilities is very deeply engaged in his research, the problem is not so much to find time for reflection on his research as to find time for not reflecting upon it and doing instead any one of the hundred other things that good parents, spouses, householders or citizens should be concerned with.

Chapter 8 (Presentations)

… people with anything to say can usually say it briefly; only a speaker with nothing to say goes on and on as if he were laying down a smoke screen.

Chapter 11 (The Scientific Process)

… every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. This imaginative preconception – a “hypothesis” – arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, the product of a blaze of insight.

The great virtue of logical immediacy in a hypothesis is that it can be tested by comparatively direct and practicable means – that is, without the foundation of a new research institute or by making a journey into outer space. A large part of the art of the soluble is the art of devising hypotheses that can be tested by practicable experiments.

A scientist is, then, a seeker after truth. The truth is that which he reaches out for, the direction toward which his face is turned. Complete certainty is beyond his reach, though, and many questions to which he woudl liek answers lie outside the universe of discourse of natural science.

Before he sets out to convince others of his observations or opinions, a scientist must first convince himself.

More generally, criticism is the most powerful weapon in any methodology of science; it is the scientist’s only assurance that he need not persist in error. All experimentation is criticism. If an experiment does not hold out the possibility of causing one to revise one’s views, it is hard to see why it should be done at all.

Chapter 12 (*Scientific Meliorism v. Scientific Messianism)

Young scientists must however never be tempted into mistaking the necessity of reason for the sufficiency of reason. Rationalism falls short of answering the many simple and childlike questions people like to ask: questions about origins and purposes…

The role I envisage for the scientist is that which may be described as “scientific meliorism”. A meliorist is simply one who believes that the world can be made a better place (“As, but what do you mean better?” and so on, and so on) by human action wisely undertaken; meliorists, moreover, believe that they can undertake it.

Meliorists are comparatively humble people who try to do good and are made happy by evidence that it has been done. This is ambition enough for a wise scientist.