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I've been thinking about research, the PhD, and future career plans, and I can't help but believe that the chances of my research work doing anything to either help us understand the world better or improve the human condition, are vanishingly small. Does anyone else feel like this? I think I have an occasional decent idea, but it seems that anything expansive or ambitious is crushed under the tedious weight of "stay focused" enforced by the PhD system, the funding system, and the publishing system. Getting to a position where your ideas can be rather more freely tested requires years and years of mindlessly "focused" work which amounts to not seeing the forest for the trees. And after the extensive training and publish-or-perish period you must fight for funding by continuing with the same inane micro-minded projects. In the end, you have a few pieces that don't amount to much and that's a career and a lifetime. It seems that many of the great world-changing discoveries of science (and especially biology) arose more by chance and haphazard discovery rather than force of effort and intellectual genius. So maybe science is a bit like playing a lottery?
Have people here considered (or actually followed through with) quitting a research career for this reason? Oftentimes people will drift into private practice because of the better compensation and more structured format, but how many people leave "science" (even if they could do it well) because it was not fulfilling? I suspect not a few. It's said that you must be curious to do science, but how does one keep alive the curiosity about some obscure biochemical pathway or protein structure when the world is so much bigger than all this?
Have people here considered (or actually followed through with) quitting a research career for this reason? Oftentimes people will drift into private practice because of the better compensation and more structured format, but how many people leave "science" (even if they could do it well) because it was not fulfilling? I suspect not a few. It's said that you must be curious to do science, but how does one keep alive the curiosity about some obscure biochemical pathway or protein structure when the world is so much bigger than all this?