Scientist Motivation, Essay 1 Thoughts #1

For my essay, I interviewed Dr. Scott Hawley, an investigator at the Stowers Institute For Medical Research in Kansas City and the dean of The Graduate School of the Stowers Institute. This is a man who I have known for many years, as the father of one of my best friends growing up, and I know him to be a very well established meiosis researcher. Yet I admit that I came into the interview with the idea that what motivated him as a scientist was foremost the idea of helping people with science, and I was pleasantly reminded that that reason is secondary to the truly foremost reason, that scientists do science for the sheer thrill of learning.

One quote in particular that struck me was the following

"Well you know I think the thing is is that science is fun, you know, and to me that's the most important things is that I have a lot of friends who are doctors and lawyers and stuff like that, and what they tell me is that they are in their fifties too and they've reached a point where they're really good at their career. But what they do now is what they were doing 10 years ago, it's what they were doing 20 years ago. And for me, what I'm doing now doesn't have anything to do with what I was doing 2 years ago."

As a scientist and educator, he believes from experience that the people who drop out of graduate studies in the sciences do so not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of wanting to be in a lab and actually do science. He described at length many of the latest technological advances that have allowed their labs to do extraordinary things compared to even a few years ago and ask questions that they thought they could never ask before. There was a genuine sense of excitement for science and a sense of marvel for the latest and greatest scientific apparatuses and techniques. He also struck as a man who was well aware of the greater social and political fabric in which his work is embedded in, which I hypothesize is necessary to promote an ethics in science. Yet he did not describe his motivations as particularly societal, but purely for a somewhat romantic notion of the thrill of doing science and the power of knowledge.

Personally, it pains me that politicians are so scientifically illiterate, like how Todd Akin of all people sits on the Congressional Science Committee. I once tried to find articles on why more scientists don't run for politics and try to change it from within. One reason was that it was suicidal to one's scientific career. I think I am coming to understand an incubated philosophy among scientists that further explain's why, that a true scientist would rather be doing science, and that a true scientist believes in the power of knowledge production itself in transforming society, though transforming society is itself not the most important thing (which I believe to be contrary to what the public and governments want science to be).

I believe these points can be seen in some of the articles we read about lab cultures. Graduate physics students who failed were the ones who did not have the determination to seek out their own curiosities and work on their own problems. The nuclear weapons scientists expressed a genuine curiosity for their science and the social context in which they were wrapped up in, and were not motivated merely by selfless reasons.