It was just after starting my PhD. As a class, we were tasked with a mock grant application. Around the same time, I was doing some exploratory experiments to pick my research focus and drafted a proposal around it. My proposal was sound and clear; it aimed to address a critical knowledge gap in epigenetics: Whether there is a combinatorial or hierarchical interaction among epigenetic components in transcriptional regulation. I faced this line of comments in the panel: “What is its utility even if everything works great?” This was a little unexpected; I was looking to benefit from criticism of the “content,” not the “utility of the output.” Another comment that I did not expect was: “We should be more mindful of the resources, which are not unlimited; we are using taxpayers’ money, and what we are doing should have a direct impact on society.”
Naïvely, I started to question my motivation. I had entered this path with a passion for making discoveries, imagining myself in the moments of “Eureka.” And all the glorified scientific activities and historical science figures: Are they driven simply by the urge to find remedies or to explain the phenomena? Did Galileo risk his life to help solve overarching problems? I strongly doubt his discovery of Jupiter’s moon, his insist on a heliocentric
theory immediately helped solve anything in his time. Did Becquerel and Curie end up exposing themselves to deadly amounts of radioactivity to invent some medical imaging technique or treatment for cancer? No. These were all valuable byproducts of their discoveries. Are Franklin, Crick, and Watson famous because they resolved the structure of a “cancer drug target”? No. DNA, the universal genetic material with magnificent features, was suVicient reason for these brilliant minds’ eagerness to understand what it looked like; they did not need anything else to substantiate the “significance” of the work. Applicability? This structure has proven instrumental for the next hundreds of fundamental and applied research.
The expectation that the impacts of discoveries will immediately solve some problems and make the world a better place is unrealistic, as we can judge from such historical examples. Indeed, many technological and medical breakthroughs are unprecedented consequences of prior overlooked discoveries. A familiar example is last year’s Nobel laureates, Profs. Karikó and Weissman’s story. Karikó’s underappreciated research on mRNA-based gene therapy and nucleoside modifications back then cost her funding and academic position. Years later, their efforts enabled the mRNA-based vaccine development, saving millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is thanks to –despite all impediments– their persistent efforts on a topic rendered “uninteresting” and “pointless” by some authorities years ago.
Speaking of which, this anecdote is excellent material for a motivational post on LinkedIn: “Never give up, believe in yourself and your work,” etc. However, such incidences signal something is wrong: Some great ideas, rigorous and robust exploratory work, and their potential impacts fly away because, at the time, they are regarded as risky, inapplicable, or medically irrelevant; the researchers are not funded or promoted. I worry that we will keep witnessing and applauding such “success against all odds” stories without questioning why we have these obstructions in the first place.
I want to conclude my piece with an analogy: Think of a jigsaw puzzle. You may not fit some randomly picked pieces into the growing chain. You may disregard them and seek only those that suit your chain. Alternatively, you may try to fit the divergent pieces elsewhere to initiate new chains. Dealing with the divergent is not a waste of time; when their time to thrive comes, they will help you complete the puzzle way faster.
About the author:
Aktan was born and raised in Ankara, Türkiye. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Cancer Research (London, UK). In his research, he likes to take exploratory approaches, through which he defined a new subtype of a chromatin remodeling complex in mammalian cells—which was later proven to be the key vulnerability in rare sarcoma subtypes—and characterised an unprecedented function of an immune-related protein on two distinct classes of transcriptional programs. Outside work, he reads comics, listens to radio dramas, and watches F1.
