This past Monday I had the opportunity to converse with my PI, Dr. Lingchong You, and to ask him how he originally got involved in science. He made some very interesting points, and I will share some of them here!
Education/Early Career
A professor of biomedical engineering, Dr. You received his B.S.E degree as well as master’s degree from Chinese universities (Chengdu University of Science and Technology and the University of Science and Technology of China, respectively) before applying to Ph. D programs in the U.S. He was not the biggest fan of molecular biology—in fact, there were moments in his master’s program where he even considered abandoning science altogether—but he eventually decided to continue in chemical engineering and ultimately received his Ph. D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It was during his Ph. D program when Dr. You really became interested in scientific research. His doctoral project involved modeling viruses, and was heavily influenced by techniques in computational biology. By the end of the program, Dr. You decided to pursue a career in academia, and received a postdoctoral position at Caltech where he performed research in synthetic biology. It was this postdoctoral position that drove him to start a lab here at Duke to study synthetic biology and systems biology in the department of biomedical engineering.
Something I found very interesting about Dr. You’s scientific education is that he never seemed to be dead-set on any one subject in science. In fact, he mentioned once that his scientific interests throughout college and graduate school seemed to undergo a “random walk.” I really respect this, because I feel that to truly discover your calling you must experiment with different subject areas (especially in science, with so many subject areas) and it should be perfectly fine to jump around in search of that one subject area you most connect with.
“Accidental Discoveries”
When I asked him what he finds most gratifying about science, Dr. You replied by explaining that some of the most satisfying moments in science occur when you formulate a working hypothesis surrounding unexpected observations in lab.
“At least half of our papers that we’ve published in the last ten years were from accidental discoveries. A lot of times we have some weird observations, and we scratch our heads, and the moment we feel like we’ve found the answer—that is the most gratifying experience to me. We feel like ‘Oh, we got it.’”
I believe there is a lesson to be learned here as well. While it is true that many experiments through a scientist’s career will fail, and there will be a lot of useless data produced, I think that good scientists know that unexpected results are not always necessarily erroneous; rather, they can sometimes lead to important new discoveries. Indeed, it is at that moment—when you realize your seemingly invalid data is actually correct and yields a new explanation for something—that being a scientist can be really satisfying.
