90 more minutes to the end of the pre-conference workshop. The professors from overseas are touring biopolis.. thus i took the opportunity to come back to the lab for a short rest.
I never excepted this workshop to be SOOOOOO intensive! Heard from a colleague (who'd attended this same conference some years back in the States) that this is supposed to be a week-long workshop, which for some reason has been compressed into two days! Imagine the amount of information crammed into our tiny heads.. and staring into the microscope for 12 hours a day is a source of terrible headache! It was a good experience though.. learnt a whole lot of stuff.. but could have been maximised if it was more spread out over a week.
Some people got abit reflective during this course.. coz we got to see really bad tumors in their raw form.. (and touch some of them).. and also getting to hear from the pathologists' point of view.. certain areas of research really isn't getting anywhere beneficial to the general population. But somehow, many pple outside the field get this misunderstanding, that everyone doing scientific research is due for a world-shattering discovery sooner or later. However, the real fact is, science is not something that one can do alone. It's not about making HUGe discoveries and being the next einstein. Working on cancer does not mean i am due to find the next cure. What happens is that everyone does a little bit.. we're like little people working on a huge puzzle. Each person finds a piece that may look unimpressive.. but when everyone comes together with their own little pieces (some bigger than the rest) and puts it together, a big picture is formed, and that's the whole big result that the general public sees. So, it's a group effort. I didn't enter this career wanting to make it big by finding a cure that noone could. I'm just joining this big team in finding more pieces of the puzzle that could eventually make up a big, beautiful picture.
Of course, i am not saying that there are zero big discoveries possible in the near future and that we're all bound to die. BUT, more often than not, alot of big discoveries are surrendipitous.. and thus it's something that we cannot really 'search' for, but can only 'chance upon'. We just have to wait for that surrendipitious discovery (whoever's lab it may be), or wait for the big puzzle to be solved piece by piece. ^_^
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Its not the point about wanting to be the one to quickly solve the puzzle that troubles me. What troubles me is that we naively think that we are in the process of solving the puzzle, but we are actually not. We should be thinking of HOW to piece the puzzle in an effective way, rather than to think that whoever is holding on to a piece of puzzle is equivalent to making a progressive contribution. Its really about re-evaluating direction and thinking out of the box.
Post a Comment