by Ursula Goodenough

Given the positive responses to my post last week of the latter portion of my commencement address at the USC, here's the text of the first portion. It includes material that I've used in prior NPR blog posts, but brings those ideas together in some new ways.

We're here to celebrate the men and women who are receiving advanced degrees in the medical sciences from the Keck School of Medicine. Some have focused on laboratory research and some have focused on public health, which is a rich mixture of the natural and social sciences.

Given the shared science core, I'd like to explore with you what it means to be a scientist.

Let me begin by noting that scientists are not some oddball group. In fact, everybody is a scientist, everyone at this gathering is a scientist.

When you're trying to figure out why your car won't start, you develop a series of hypotheses and then you test them: Maybe I've run out of gas (you check the gas gauge); maybe the battery is dead (you check the headlights). When you're trying to figure out the effect of adding an herb to that pot of soup you're fixing for company, you pour aliquots into 2 bowls, add the herb to one (experimental) and not to the other (control), and test the outcome.

 

So while we're all scientists, and employ the "scientific method" routinely when we analyze alternatives, most college graduates follow careers that focus on other matters. They become bankers or politicians or artists or whatever.

Those who opt for careers as research scientists undergo extensive education and training so that their ability to evaluate alternatives is deeply informed by what's already known in their field — which buffer system works best for a given enzyme assay, which statistical tool is appropriate to analyze some epidemiological data. This education allows them to take their scientific interests out to the edges — out to what is not yet known — asking new questions of nature in all her guises.

But becoming a research scientist isn't only about being educated and credentialed with academic degrees, important as these things are. It also entails developing certain qualities of mind, where I'll lift up three of them.

First, research scientists are curious. They are eager to figure out the answers to the questions they are asking, questions that they find extremely interesting. As all of you graduates have doubtless experienced by now, those eureka moments of discovery are in fact few and far between. Most experiments and meta-analyses don't work, or give confusing answers, or point to unexpected conclusions that you need to explore further. But the curiosity pulls us forward: as one friend put it, "We scientists go through life anticipating the real moment tomorrow." This is to me a stunning and quite thrilling realization — that the hundreds of thousands of scientists in the world have major facets of their existence organized around their expectations of discovery.

Second, research scientists are flexible. They are comfortable about changing their minds when presented with unexpected data or with a better perspective than the one they have been holding. This flexibility must, of course, be grounded in a framework of wisdom. As physicist Richard Feynman once put it: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."

And third, research scientists are interested in ideas, interested in abstraction. They enjoy generalizing about things in addition to categorizing them. They enjoy testing models and paradigms. They love to "talk science."

These qualities of mind, I might note, put research scientists squarely in the lineage of intellectuals throughout the ages, in all fields of human inquiry. You may not feel comfortable thinking of yourself as an intellectual — it's a word that is often, unfortunately, used as a pejorative in our culture, as in saying that someone is "too intellectual," which is code for "out of touch." But I encourage you to move past that discomfort and embrace the notion that you participate in a long history of intellectual inquiry in the best sense of that concept.