Training to be a scientist

It confuses me when people ask me what I am. I'm a PhD student in Microbiology. What I assumed, when I first started out, is that I would be a scientist. Except that, five years down the line, I don't feel like one.

The vision of a scientist I have in mind is someone who has a broad knowledge of a lot of aspects of science- not merely factual information. It has to be someone who understands the history and philosophy of science, not someone who merely keeps abreast of the latest news, but who can put it in broad perspective and a historical context. It has to be someone who looks at scientific success not just as a list of publications. My ideal scientist has to think- and disseminate these thoughts extensively and accessibly- about scientific education, about ways to inspire younger people to seek answers for themselves.

When you search for articles on biomedical graduate education either on Google or Pubmed, the articles that come up are very rarely relevant. After sifting through dozens of results on graduate programs, you may stumble across a decade-old article that may be slightly useful. Invariably, even these articles are found, not in reputed scientific journals, but in medical journals. Medicine, unlike science, has a long history of people constantly thinking about undergraduate and graduate medical education, redefining core competencies in each field, addressing problems that may affect this education and so on.

Perhaps one reason for this is the rather mistaken assumption that science is an individual endeavor- one struggles and struggles and suddenly finds the light. While this is certainly a prevalent notion in the minds of PhD students about their doctoral work, surely this cannot be sufficient for producing scientists of any calibre? Seeking answers to important questions is surely something that cannot be done in a trice, but there needs to be some better ways of training people to do so. Putting them in a laboratory, generating a set of experiments to be done by some deadline and churning out papers is the wrong way of doing it. This method may work in the long run: the young graduate follows this same path through post doc and early independent work, and suddenly after decades of this, is in a position to clearly see how it all fits in it. But most likely, it will deaden the enthusiasm of young people entering the field (the Council for Graduate Education in the US estimates that 24% of the candidates entering a doctoral program in life sciences will end up leaving the program without getting their degrees)

My idea of a successful training program would be to ensure that all students understand the path of science. We didn't get to the point that we are in miraculously and instantly. What we know now has taken decades, if not centuries, of questioning, observation, hypothesizing and thought. Unless graduate students know of and understand the historical thought processes that have ultimately led to a particular question, there can be no appreciation for the magnitude or the scale of the scientific question that they are now posing. Instead their vision can only be limited- limited by the minor sub questions that they must break down the larger question into, and by the mundane practicalities of day to day laboratory work.

This, if it doesn't kill any love for science, will only produce mediocre researchers or lab workers who, biased by their own view of science, can only pose variations on the questions that have already been asked before.