1. I trained in North America & the UK & was very fortunate to experience 2 completely different styles of doing science. I wanted to discuss briefly why, as a scientist, it's useful, though challenging, to experience ways of doing science that are very different from each other
2. Broadly speaking, what I saw drive the science in North America were the tools & techniques available to answer a particular question. We would do a bunch of experiments to try probe & generate data about the underlying biology. We we would screen, make constructs, do stuff!
3. The main advantage of this North American way of doing science was that we were very comprehensive & would get lots of data. The main disadvantage was that a lot of the data didn't quite address the question we were asking. I often wished the experiments were deigned better.
4. Broadly speaking, what drove the science in the UK were the theoretical models for how we imagined things work. We spent a lot of time trying to suggest models & then design experiments that would test these models in specific ways. We did a lot of sitting around & thinking.
5. The main advantage of the UK style of science was that we designed clean experiments that gave specific answers. A disadvantage was that if the model was off, experiments failed, & we'd be back to square 1. Sometimes I wished we'd gathered more data before formulating a model
6. Of course this was my own experience. There are plenty of labs in North America that are primarily model driven, & lots of UK labs that do non-hypothesis based research. But the key for me was my own training happened in places with two very distinct, divergent, approaches.
7. Experiencing two very different styles of science was challenging & required adjustment. But very quickly I realised how useful this would be. I could utilise whichever approach worked best for a particular problem. Importantly, I also realised the style I used was a choice.
8. This is key because I think a lot of the way people get trained to do science is to be told "this is the only way to do science". But this is not true, there are many ways to do science as long as you adhere to basic universal rules (things like good controls & proper stats).
9. One of the main steps in becoming a scientist is figuring out the kind of scientist you are, what style suits you best, having confidence to pursue questions you want to pursue using your favourite approaches. As in everything else science thrives when we encourage diversity.
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