Science: Natural Obsessions and Naturally Obsessed

What is it like to be a molecular biology researcher?

Most movies have scientists in the form of the "mad scientist" or the "nerd scientist."

But what about a realistic portrait of the life of the average lab researcher?

When I was a graduate student, Natural Obsessions was the book that told the story of our profession.

For this generation, Naturally Obsessed is a one-hour documentary that attempts to capture the life of the lab. I hope to see it on Netflix at some point or if it gets shown on TV or some other venue.

The titles of the two works say it all.

To be a research scientist requires a certain level of smarts.

But a lot of people are smart and many even smarter who do other things and rightly so.

What lab research requires most is persistence and dogged determination that borders and crosses the line into obsession. It requires the willingness to try again an experiment a little differently. It requires the drive to look at the data that extra dozen times to find out what went wrong and what went right. It requires drawing up models to explain the data and then ruthlessly ripping it up for flaws. And after doing that going back to the data and trying another model that looks at the problem sideways.

No, there won't be a TV show called, LA Lab nor a soap opera called General Research Unit or Gray's Biology but our story is being told.

If you want to see if passion and reason can be combined, then talk to a research scientist.