Oncogene addiction

to begin with and be bloody-minded about continuing this specific interest. You should always enjoy biology, even when some aspects of doing research are tedious or even unsuccessful. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, then you might as well be in business and be paid well to do boring things! Beyond that it is a matter of personal style; my advice depends upon where you are on the personality gradient between risk-adverse and risk-prone, and how comfortable you are with the unpredictable. At one extreme, if you are (like me) more risk-prone, you should be extremely exploratory, daring, and original in the scientific questions you ask and do research on. Do ‘interesting’ science rather than ‘important’ science. This is more likely to yield significant new discoveries because few people have addressed supposedly ‘unimportant’ questions. The history of science suggests that almost no major discoveries were done because that research topic was ‘important’ at that time. There is a bigger risk to your career in going for interesting science for three reasons: you might get into an intellectual cul-de-sac, so you need to learn how to recognize dead ends; it is much harder to get funding for really original or ‘unimportant’ science; you need to have thorough knowledge which cuts across several scientific fields, which takes longer and requires more effort. You will also have to learn how to recognize completely new phenomena. Don’t get caught in intellectual ruts caused by excessive reading of the literature, but do be careful to ensure that you give all credit to all published work. Let natural phenomena be your guide rather than the literature if you want to make really new discoveries. At the other extreme, if you are risk-adverse, then stick to ‘important’ and applied science or technology, it is far easier because questions are well-defined and funding is easy, and its easy to churn out papers making tiny advances, so your career will advance quickly. But the risk is that you won’t make any significant contribution to science and your name will be forgotten after you go into administration because tiny advances are not satisfying, or retire, rich. As you can see, where you sit on the gradient is a matter of taste and style, but don’t forget your original goals! What do you think of the worldwide trend in research councils and foundations towards more and more applied research at the expense of ‘pure’ research? I am worried by this trend. It is presumably driven by the fact that research councils and foundations have to justify spending money to their governments and boards, and it is difficult to sustain funding if it seems ‘unimportant’ or even ‘useless’. Very few people controlling research funding realize that breakthroughs in science are like a tree giving off thousands of seeds of which only a few germinate. As a result, the people in councils have to favor ‘important’ science, and researchers have to stretch descriptions of basic research to sound as though it has significant applied implications. This is terrible, for two reasons. First it inhibits genuine exploratory (‘blue sky’) research, hence greatly reduces the probability of genuinely new discoveries and concepts. Second, and positively dangerous, the constant exaggerated description of all research projects having supposedly significant applied outcomes is constantly raising the expectations of the public. As this gets worse and worse expectations rise and failures become more frequent, and public confidence in science declines. This is the classical problem of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival. Pretending all science has immediate beneficial applications results in long term destruction of support for and interest in science. Right now we are just depending upon sheer numbers of researchers stumbling on new phenomena in a social atmosphere of rapidly declining confidence in science because we are constantly raising expectations. Somebody needs to write a popular book about the cultural/social environment that has favored major scientific breakthroughs in the past, and how this needs to be encouraged. We risk the long-term survival of science by not letting the public know how science really proceeds.