It is very important to retain the perspective of a curious child. Some of us are luckier than others, perhaps with regards to the environment in which we grew and learnt. But everyone is born with an enquiring mind. Feeding that curiosity and asking the next question is a habit one should develop or better still, never lose. Unfortunately, in India, the vast majority of students in the research field get there out of negative selection. They did not make it into medicine or engineering, hence a post-graduation degree and then even a PhD path is chosen; research was the not obvious first choice. Choosing research as an immediate source of obtaining an income is fraught with danger. Firstly, because the scholarship disbursal systems are often inefficient and secondly, salary scales are much lower. But if you have chosen this path, give it some thought. Is there a field you are comfortable with? Any particular problem you wish to solve? How will you go about it? Do you have a hypothesis? How will you test the hypothesis? What experiments will you conduct to collect the data that will prove or disprove your hypothesis? Plan your experiments carefully, with appropriate checks and balances. Often while guiding students, it has been my observation that students with brilliant academic pasts are the ones that find research most difficult. If an experiment yields a result different from what was expected, they are very quick to doubt themselves. They must have erred, hence this result. Or they are so taken aback with the unexpected, that they take a long while to recover. Unbiased trouble shooting is the hallmark of a good researcher.
“Research begins when we protect the curiosity of a child, question without fear, and learn to treat every unexpected result not as failure, but as discovery.“
Fields and research areas differ in pace of research and progress. Hence it is very unfair to judge all research progress with the same lens. It only creates stress of the wrong kind. Be receptive to constructive criticism without descending into a valley of depression and anxiety because someone pointed out a flaw in your experiment. Speaking about your work and discussing your results with others beyond your working group is the best way to improve your understanding of your data and results.
With new methods of acquiring information and advanced storage devices, our pace of discovery should change. We should be able to solve problems in double quick time! There is a ton of data out there. Gone are the days when the only information you had, was the readings you noted down from your titration experiment, or the sequence data you got from your cloning experiment. The quantum of effort needed to justify a PhD thesis in 1990, can be completed in a few days today and with very little hands-on effort. But has biology changed? No, life’s processes have not changed. What has changed is our ability to measure and record change in much smaller bite sizes of time and space, accurately. Processes are more affordable and more data can be collected reliably and reproducibly. Today you can decide to be a doer and generate data, or you can decide to work on data generated by others which can sourced following due process. With the evolving world of AI one can be very easily fooled into thinking that data generation is a thing of the past! Remember someone still has to generate the data. That’s where a country like India can have a big advantage.
Talk of a rare disease. By some definitions, it is something that concerns about 5 / 10,000 people which means it affects several lakh individuals in India. So, work on the biology, come up with a drug, there will be many who will benefit. Want to study human behavior? There is no shortage of participants of any kind. So, there is tremendous opportunity here to solve real world problems. Pick one carefully and give it your all. There is nothing that we as a country cannot achieve!
