Eve Marder
So I don't know if I would've had this conversation about the difference between consumers of knowledge and creators of knowledge.
Lily He
Not as much.
Eve Marder
OK, so early students, high school students, most college students are consumers of knowledge. They read books. They go to class and they learn received wisdom. Right? And if they're very good and they're very good at it, they they process it and they think about it.
Eve Marder
But there's still learning received wisdom. And if you want to train a scientist and there's a real difference, you have to teach someone to make the transition from being a consumer knowledge, being creator of knowledge. That is a very painful transition for some people. Some people love reading about science. And, you know, you can spend an hour or two and read a paper that might have taken ten people five years to do and you can get it all in an hour.
Eve Marder
And there are people who are fabulous consumers of knowledge and fabulous readers. But to have the patience and the energy and will and curiosity, to push back the boundaries of knowledge and to say my time and effort is worth, to discover something that nobody else in the world has ever seen or done or understood before. That's what real science is.
Eve Marder
And sometimes when you when you see a young person, you can recognize when they're 18 or 19 or 20 years old that they are real scientists. They've already made that transition. It's rare to have someone make that transition as an undergraduate. But you were one of the people who did. And that's that first summer when you came in and said, I want to do this or I did this.
Eve Marder
And I said, OK, this is a real scientist, and now I just have to not wreck her. Right. I mean, that's the challenge with really with really young scientists, is to make sure that you don't destroy their love of discovery and the fact that they find it really fascinating to push back at the boundaries of knowledge. Right. And I'm sure in graduate school, you have colleagues who are still consumers of knowledge, and they haven't made that transition.
Eve Marder
And some of them will never make the transition. Some of them will become fabulous journal editors because a really good Journal editor is someone who's a really good consumer of knowledge and not necessarily creator of knowledge. And so I think that one of the things that makes me so happy about you is you have in you that that drive to be a creator of knowledge.
Eve Marder
You've always had it and you keep you keep finding ways to look someplace that no one's ever seen before. And there's there's something incredibly exciting about doing even something very small and mundane and knowing that you've seen something that nobody in the world has ever seen before. And you know what I'm talking about. Right?
Lily He
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Eve Marder
And that's what drives real scientists. I mean, you know, and then you need all the skills and all this and all that. And you have to know how to read and write and speak and all that. And know how to take the right pictures and know how to document. But it's that it's that joy of seeing something that no one has ever seen before that drives that drove the old naturalists and that still drives in any scientist today.
Eve Marder
If they're really a scientist.