• Question: What makes a good scientist?

    Asked by lilygrainger to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 12 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 12 Jun 2012:

      Go to my profile and read up 🙂

      Dedication, a good brain, morals!!!! You need to be able to challenge current theories in a logical, well thought out manner and ensure that your results are reliable and reproducible – not just a one off

      And- as your are showing here- the ability to ask not only lots of questions but the right questions

    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 12 Jun 2012:

      Many different character traits can work: I’m not touting myself as the ideal scientist (not by a long way!), but anything interesting I’ve discovered has been when my experiments have given me results I wasn’t expecting. Instead of trying to pretend they didn’t happen, I took a step back, tried to shake off my preconceptions, and tried to work out what the result was telling me. It’s not always easy when you have to throw out a pet theory! I suppose imagination, tenacity, honesty are all things I aspire to as I try to become a better scientist.

    • Photo: Anouk Gouvras

      Anouk Gouvras answered on 14 Jun 2012:

      I think the most important ingredients are curiosity, enthusiasm, honesty and yep imagination. You need curiosity to ask the questions and be interested (science doesn’t pay well enough to be bored, well not in my field anyway), honesty so that you can admit it when you are wrong about something and try something else (it happens a lot!), enthusiasm so that you don’t mind being wrong and you can cope with repeating experiments and work, dealing with budgets and paperwork, and imagination to well, make stuff up and then test out your theory. 🙂

      I’d like to say you need a good brain but honestly mine isn’t that great, I make up for it by being enthusiastic so sorry Chris, going to disagree with that one as I don’t think I’m a bad scientist 🙂

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