Frustrations of a scientist.

Good morning. Wednesday, Jan 21, 2008. I am a scientist and the basic goal of the work of a scientist is to investigate things in his particular area. Science today is a profession, a whole global system of people and institutions, of students, teachers, researchers and publication media. When you live inside of science it is a little bit as if you live inside of the music industry. You might love science or you might love music. That is important if you want to work in the area. But the industry which basically leads the profession is much less enthusiastic about it. It is an industry, looking for money. It is a system driven by professional criticism. It is like in politics, where some politician from party A does not say anything good about a politician from party B.

Appreciation of work is not at all widely distributed in our society. When I grew up I realized how often the musicians around me spoke negatively about some soloist. After many years in science and publishing dozens of research papers I know how negative colleagues can speak about the work of the others. If we would only know to appreciate all the work which is done and which is important for society, how much better could life be for all of us. Instead we agree to support a stupid system which appreciates only the century work, only the rare moment when something really new arises. And even this is only accepted much later usually. It is extremely difficult to judge new developments. Some of them die quickly, others flourish - but who can tell in the beginning?

The new testament has much to contribute to our further development of science. Jesus talks about relations of people - and we can learn from this as scientists to build a better community. It is not a task we will do in one day, but finally there is no alternative to this! [R.P., Reading, UK]

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