The Beast from the East has kept most of us indoors more than usual over the past week. Over the weekend this meant I spent more time at my desk.  Although I do normally spend some time carrying out routine admin tasks, I generally manage to get some time to myself as well.  But this week I spent the whole of Saturday and Sunday writing research papers and catching up on items I’d been promising colleagues for a while.  My daughter was with us for the weekend and she obviously thought this was a pretty dull way to spend one’s “free” time.  But I’m not sure I agree.  Doing research and writing papers is the creative part of being a scientist and I think for most of us it’s what drew us into academia in the first place.

I often think of an old friend who died recently, who was also a scientist. He used to say “I can’t paint or do any of those other creative things, but I can design experiments.”  I know exactly what he meant and that is why I was quite happy to spend my weekend writing up my research.  When you can start to look at problems in ways that haven’t been tried before, think about them from a completely different perspective, and begin to work towards new solutions, that’s what gives me a real buzz.  Nowadays research also provides the opportunity to work with colleagues across the world.  Nobody has to be the lone scientist working away without human contact any more.  We are constantly linking up, using technology such as Skype, discussing papers with co-investigators in other countries sparking ideas off one another and co-authoring papers.

I have my own theory about what draws people into science. Children are universally interested and curious about the world around them but many, perhaps even most, seem to lose that as they grow into their teens.  Scientists, I think, manage to retain that inquisitive spark.  We are certainly at the extreme end of the spectrum of childlike curiosity, so maybe our development is arrested in some way!  At a time when, as I discussed in my last blog, it often feels as though we spend all our time measuring science, perhaps we should be spending a bit more time celebrating that childlike joy in scientific creativity.  If we lose any sense of wonder about advancing human knowledge, we might as well give up on science completely.

Of course there is always a downside to success in science as in any other undertaking in life. The more research you do, the more papers you publish, the more returns you have to make about those publications.  (Yes I’m thinking of you Researchfish, among other obligations.)  Thus, it seems as though the more creative you are, the more time you then have to spend on non-creative tasks.  You might be tempted to assume that failure to comply never catches up with you or even that nobody is going to read the returns anyway.  However, I now know that isn’t true as I also received an email at the weekend, complaining that I hadn’t included the requisite number of characters in a particular box!  And so, back to the admin.