The other day, I got an email from my friend Karen McLeod, the managing director of COMPASS, asking me why I do what I do. Karen had just written a blog post about how it seems very hard for scientists to explain their why. The few scientists who answered her question preferred to do so anonymously. This got me thinking about why I do what I do.
This is actually a really difficult question to answer, and I don’t think that it’s because I’m a scientist (and all of the training baggage that entails). It’s a fundamental, existential question that people in general don’t often ask themselves – like why am I here? I think that most of us do what we do because of serendipity. Scientists, like other people, end up where they are, doing what they do, because of a series of decisions they made along the way.
However, the initial trigger – what motivated that first decision that set a lifetime course – is irresistible, innate, genetic. Take me, for example. A little while ago, my eldest daughter leafed through a diary I had kept in my early teens. It was full of lists – heights, swimming times, school grades, with analyses of percent change over time. ‘Wow, mum’, she exclaimed, ‘you’ve always been this way!’ I’d never thought about it before, but she was right. I’ve always loved trends and patterns, if not numbers (as my high school math grades can attest). Mix that with parents who loved the ocean, and my initial course was set.
I had the good fortune of being able to follow my engrained inclinations (i.e., marine biology, after a completely misguided attempt at getting into med school – me… who hates being around sick people!), and then I collided with the field of behavioural ecology. This started a deep love affair with exciting behavioural questions about mate choice and little coral reef fish called redlip blennies. (Haha! I was tempted to write its scientific name, but I will refrain.) I couldn’t get enough of asking those kinds of questions and floating over coral reefs to collect data to answer them. Doing a PhD almost killed this passion. The questions were still right but the supervisor was not. I actually dropped out of academia for a couple of years and edited science books. I came back to the ivory tower as a part-time instructor. What did I do to fill my time when I wasn’t teaching? Research, of course! Little experiments on mussels in small glass containers on a square metre of bench in a cold room. It was an almost compulsive draw for me to think of questions that no one had asked before and to know what to do to answer them. It still is, although these days, I give the questions to my students and they get to collect the data.
The questions have changed over time. I don’t wonder so much about the minutiae of fish mate choice anymore. How can I when the ecosystem my little fish live in is falling apart? I could say that I now do what I do because I want to change the world. That’s partly true. Even more so since I’ve had children because I want them, and their kids, and their kids after that, to be able to swim over coral reefs and watch redlip blennies do their thing. It’s grand and noble and altruistic to want to change the world, but deep inside, I don’t really believe that I will make much of a difference. Perhaps I will indirectly through the great students I’ve trained, but my science itself – which nowadays is more often about doom and gloom than about uplifting solutions – won’t likely cut it.
If I’m really honest, I do what I do for purely self-indulgent reasons. I do what I do because I love discovery, both the process and the end result, I love solving puzzles, I love making sense of little parts of the world around me. It’s very personal and revealing to admit something that defines you to the core (and in my case, perhaps labels you as a nerd forever!). That’s perhaps why it’s so hard for scientists, and people in general, to articulate their why.
Sea pearls 