In defence of passion

Graduate students and post-docs often ask “What do I need to do to succeed?” One popular answer is to boost your career by networking feverishly, finding powerful mentors, learning to pinpoint hot areas, and publishing in sexy journals. This approach has two problems: it makes succeeding in biology sound like learning to sell used cars, and it relies heavily on prognostication, a skill that even politicians have yet to master. I want to discuss a more oldfashioned solution: do work that you feel excited and passionate about. The first step is to find a problem that is hard to solve, located in an unpopular area, and interesting enough to push you out of bed every morning. If your problem is hard, you’ll have to endure more failure in your quest. Because failure hurts, most of us learn from it faster than we do from success. In addition, succeeding after a long struggle gives you confidence that you can tackle other difficult problems. Working in an unpopular area gives you the time to fail and learn without worrying about an enormous factory lab overtaking you in the night. Finally, your problem must generate the excitement and passion that will keep you going through thick and thin. How do you find the perfect problem? Start by consulting less fashionable sources. Try leafing through solid but unflashy journals for papers that identify new puzzles, and talking to older scientists about interesting problems that have been waiting for fresh young blood. Information from more than a century of interesting experiments on an enormous diversity of creatures is lodged in the cerebral crinkles of people whose careers began before the dominance of molecular biology and model organisms. If you’re interested in cell biology, consider reading E.B. Wilson’s classic book The Cell in Development and Heredity. Any question that Wilson asked in 1925 and is still unanswered is likely to identify an interesting problem. For example, what is a centrosome made of, how does it duplicate, and how does it position itself within a cell?