SSS 2011-06-27

（单词翻译）

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau Germany.This will just take a little more time than our usual minute.

Oliver Smithies won the Nobel Prize in Physiology¹ or Medicine in 2007. On June 27th, he spoke² to students about what he learned from his thesis research, which involved developing a new method to measure the osmotic pressures of mixes of proteins:

"Here's my osmotic pressure measurement. And I was rather proud of this method. And I published it with great delight. This paper has a record, you know: nobody ever quoted it. And nobody ever used the method again. And I didn't use the method again. So I have to ask you, what was the point of it all? Well, the answer is really a very serious answer. The answer is I learned to do good science. But it didn't matter what I did when I was learning to do good science. So it doesn't matter what you do when you're doing a thesis, you see. But it's very important that you enjoy it. Because if you don't enjoy it, you won't do a good job and you won't learn science. So all of this comes around to the fact that if you don't enjoy what you're doing, ask your advisors⁴ to let you do something else. And if your advisor³ won't do that, there's another solution: change your advisor."

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, from the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting I'm Steve Mirsky.