I am at the last year of my PhD. I started working on a topic which was quite new in the sci community. I also published about 5 articles on that topic and 4 other articles in related topics. Sometimes i had too much pressure to publish my works as it normally happens in a place where you have to maintain a good balance between productivity and novelty of your work (i guess). However, sometimes i feel that i lose my interest to improve my experimental data and losing freedom of thinking about the creativity of the whole work. Sometimes, i also feel that i am running too fast that i dont even care about the trees on the street. Where is the freedom in PhD? How can we learn to be an independent researcher? Hope to have it after the PhD!!!

Over the last 6 months I have been checking regularly the journals to see if anyone has published something in the direction of our research project. This morning, when I was just going online to check some references, the article hit me right between the eyes. There it was, my idea, the result looking exactly as I had expected it to be. Only the names of the authors are different; a leading US research group has apparently pursued the same concept and has already obtained the result we have been looking for during the last months.

Read more... (623 words, 1 image, estimated 2:30 minutes reading time)

Ever-increasing competition for unfairly limited funding is backfiring. Territorial allocations and research topic fixing is hurting the creativity of researchers and specially demotivating the younger generation.

The title of this post may sound too provocative, but let me quote three dialogs, which I have witnessed in the last six months, to show how real this threat is. You may have heard such conversations as well.

Read more... (518 words, estimated 2:04 minutes reading time)

Successful scientists are driven by curiosity and by ego. Lay people find it disappointing when told that egos of individual scientists play a  crucial role in the progress of science. But the same people complain that their country has produced too few Nobel prize winners.

First discovery claims and disputes have always been part of science, from Newton to Montaigner (Nobel prize medicine 2008). Big ego’s and accompanying priority claims will always be part of science.

Read more... (784 words, 4 images, estimated 3:08 minutes reading time)