The Joy of Discovery – and beyond
One of the rewards of old age is the chance to take care of grandchildren. You see, grandchildren are pure delight. Someone had actually said (I don’t know whom to attribute this statement to) that: “If I had known how great grandchildren are, I wouldn’t have bothered to have children; I would have had grandchildren straightaway.” Of course, that is a biological impossibility, but it expresses the joy of grandparenthood.
When I babysit my grandchildren, I make sure that they are safe and don’t get hurt, and I teach them and point things out to them. But, by and large, I let them explore the world around them and discover things on their own. I want them to experience the Joy of Discovery. Little children are naturally curious and to them everything is new. They frequently ask: “Why?”, “How?”
Scientists also are naturally curious – most scientists, anyway. The ones who are curious are the ones who turn out to be inventive, innovative.
When we train our budding scientists, we should nurture and encourage their natural curiosity and we should not stifle that curiosity by imposing limitations, boundaries, or restrictions to their (scientific) activities. As with our children, limitations should probably be no more than that they should cause no harm to themselves or to others. A scientist, who has been trained to simply follow orders from above (from his mentors), may not develop the ability, the capacity or the inclination to be an independent, innovative researcher.
Curious scientists, like little children, also ask: “Why?”, “How?” But, unlike children, many scientists then ask: “What now?” After getting answers to the “Why?” and the “How?”, they then explore further (exploit?) the possibilities revealed by those answers. They want to know what benefits can be derived from their work.
Of course, there are scientists who are not bothered by the possible consequences, good or bad, of their studies. They reason that they are adding to general knowledge (True); that somebody else, today or at some time in the future, may find use for their results (True).
For example, what earthly good is it to know that the Earth was formed billions of years after the Big Bang and that it took a few billion years more after that for man to become man? Ah, but the tools that were used to make those determinations may someday be useful in the treatment of disease.
We have a clear example of an endeavor that has resulted in seemingly unintended benefits: the space program. To send things up into space, they may not be too big, ergo, the need for miniaturization. Fast computers are needed to control and manipulate the various objects sent into space. Very little else could be sent up if computers had remained as huge and as slow as they were 40 years ago. Because of the need to make things small and ever smaller, we now have devices, often controlled by very small but very powerful computer chips that have reached even the realm of medicine. A good example is the cochlear implant, an electronic device that can be implanted surgically and that provides hearing sensation to persons who are profoundly deaf or are severely hearing-impaired. The invention of the cochlear implant is a direct result of the scientific and engineering requirements of the space program.
There are instances where useful observations have resulted from pure serendipity, e.g., the accidental discovery of penicillin. When Alexander Fleming saw that bacteria did not grow around a particular mold that had contaminated his experiment, he proceeded to isolate and test the substance that was responsible for the phenomenon. That resulted in the development of the first antibiotic.
And there are many instances where useful results have been obtained by thoughtful design and dogged work, e.g., the engineering of antibodies useful against allergies. Allergy is known to result from the production of a certain type of antibody, the IgE, against an otherwise innocuous substance, an allergen. IgE is usually found bound to the surface of certain immune system cells, the mast cells in connective tissue and the basophils in the blood. The binding of allergen to the IgE antibodies on mast cells and basophils results in the sneezing, coughing, itchiness, and other reactions, sometimes even death, that are commonly associated with allergy. Some scientists then reasoned that one way to treat allergy is to develop an antibody that would bind to IgE and prevent it from binding to mast cells and basophils. That antibody had to be carefully chosen from among several hundred and then engineered to make it acceptable to the immune system of a human patient. That antibody, now fully developed, is currently available as an approved treatment for allergies.
Discovering a new law of Nature, discovering an explanation for a natural phenomenon, discovering something useful… — they are all a source of joy to a scientist. The celebration that follows a successful experiment or the acceptance for publication of a submitted manuscript is an outward manifestation of that joy. In many respects, a scientist is like a little child — ever the curious, ever the explorer. But unlike a child, a scientist explores beyond the immediate, beyond the obvious.
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Eduardo A. Padlan is a corresponding member of the NAST and an adjunct professor in the Marine Science Institute,
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