Broadening your horizons

Travel is an integral part of a career as a life scientist — in fact, you can’t become a scientist without travelling. In the early stages it’s quite natural to have serious doubts about whether you’re on the right career path. Traveling lets you forget these worries and puts things in perspective. You will then begin to see whether you are just worrying unecessarily or whether you are really faced with a fundamental and life-altering decision. As a graduate student, therefore, you must make at least two big trips. You don’t necessarily have to go abroad, but the point is to break from your usual routine and have time for reflection. Travel not only refreshes the spirit, it also has great practical value. I travel abroad four or five times a year, and even more often within Japan. Just as you discover unusual kinds of food on a journey, the information you come across at a meeting or as a visitor is direct, fresh and diverse. As well as hearing new findings before they are public, you also tend to pick up interesting morsels that you would never get from simply reading a paper. In addition, it’s good to see for yourself what people are really like, especially if you’ve known them only through hearsay or their published work. Once you’ve met researchers in your field you’ll start reading their papers very differently. It is often said that to qualify as a famous professor you must visit your lab only occasionally. I was once amazed to hear that a well-known researcher gave 100 lectures within the United States in a year, but I realized later that this was not exceptional. Many researchers exhibit an almost evangelical zeal when it comes to communicating their results. But this should not be regarded solely as self-promotion. The point is that travel provides two different opportunities: one is to transmit information to others and the other is to acquire new information from the outside.