• Question: If you have one day left to be a scientist, what do you do with it?

    Asked by Chemist_of_Questions to Stéphane, Matt, Gemma, David on 13 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: David Howard

      David Howard answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      I’d write down as many of my results and ideas as I could to pass on to someone else.

    • Photo: Stéphane Berneau

      Stéphane Berneau answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      This is really hard … I would do a similar thing as David: complete my lab book, write down my idea and probably give a talk on my last discovering to encourage people to follow up on my project.

    • Photo: Gemma Chandratillake

      Gemma Chandratillake answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      I don’t think you can stop being a scientist. You can stop doing a particular project, so if that was the case, obviously you’d try to leave it tidy so that someone can continue that work. However, being a scientist is a state of mind, it means that you question the way things are, that you are skeptical when you are told that things have to be a certain way. I think that is a characteristic that once developed, would be difficult to leave behind. Yes, you may no longer be formally be employed as a scientist in the narrow professional sense of the word, but I don’t think that stops you from applying scientific method or reasoning in your life; noticing things, asking why, coming up with potential explanations (hypotheses), testing them, rejecting them, etc. Certain experiments require expensive equipment, hence are restricted to the realm of the professional scientist, but others do not. Simple observations can open up whole new areas. One of my favourite examples of this is that quite recently someone noticed that some flowers have iridescent petals (look at the black bit in the centre of a red tulip, it’s shiny like a CD), and they wondered what the shininess was; was it a colour pigment or what? That opened up a whole new field in understanding structural pigments and also studying the way insects view them (http://www.botanic.cam.ac.uk/Botanic/NewsItem.aspx?p=27&ix=85). People just hadn’t really studied iridescence in plants before, yet we’ve all seen it. It doesn’t cost anything to ask the question and look up whether the answer is well understood or not. I am constantly asking “why?” and looking things up…it’s always fun when you notice that an explanation has holes in it!

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