Buzz Baum - Being a scientist: journey into the unknown

Buzz Baum, Cell Biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, discusses what it really means to be a scientist.

About Buzz Baum

"I’m a Cell Biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

I am fascinated by the process by which one cell becomes two. I research how this process led to the origins of life on Earth, how it can go wrong to cause diseases like cancer, and how we might be able to solve them."

Key Points

• Science is about the creative process of discovery, about going out into a place where you know that the things you’ve learned may be wrong and taking that to the next step, in collaboration with others. • If you don’t get pleasure from seeing that one thing that disproves your hypothesis, or from rethinking your hypothesis, or from doing an experiment just to check your equipment works, then it’s very hard to be a scientist. • One of the strengths of science is collaboration: different voices each having their own ideas, each listening to one another. The more different voices you have, the better the science is.

A journey into the unknown

I like to think about science, and maybe the scientist, as a bit like one of these explorers who’s got a map of the world. It’s a flat map. They imagine a two-dimensional world and they’re going out exploring in the 1400s, 1500s, to map continents. And because it’s really a journey into the unknown, where you don’t know where you’re going, you have a map, but it’s not a very good one. You also have tools like telescopes, lenses, which can help you to explore, to see things that maybe the previous generation of explorers didn’t before our better ships, better microscopes, better telescopes.

So you go into new lands and try to map them out and get a better picture of the world that’s out there. I think one of the difficulties about explaining science is in understanding what it’s like to do science. When we learn science in school, we tend to mainly learn facts about the world – but we don’t have to memorise them and that can make it quite boring. I found it boring anyway. In art, you learn, you’re taught to like, to play and to create all these things. But if you want to discover new places, you really have to throw yourself into the unknown. You will have tools that can help you, but you don’t know what you’re going to see.

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