Science progresses by asking questions and by challenging established concepts and proposing new ones. The key to the success and prosperity of any nation lies in the effective combination of three factors: technology, raw material, and capital. It is by creation and advancement of new technology that a deficit of raw material can be overcome and demand for capital reduced. But technology can only grow through advancement of science and its application.
In a scientific organization, a research team includes a senior scientist(s) supported by postdocs, graduate students, and research assistants. These individuals, each having a different immediate career goal and a different work efficiency, often want to work with some degree of independence. On the other hand, a high level of performance in the context of an organizational infrastructure requires them to work as a team. Thus success lies in ensuring that everyone works towards common goals, which permits leveraging the collective wisdom, talent, and efforts of everyone in the lab.
Work Specialization and Team Building
The main idea of an efficient organizational design is that an entire job is not done by one individual. It is broken down into steps, and a different person completes each step. In a research setup, each lab member should specialize in doing the part of a project he or she is good at, rather than the entire project being handed over to one individual. All members of a group should know as precisely as possible what is expected of them and what they expect of themselves. Each person’s motivation for doing the research should be clear.
The responsibility of a mentor in such a setup goes far beyond simply providing scientific advice and facts. It is the mentor who can look for places where different teams and team members need to connect and help them do it. Without a deliberate structure to support this, it is almost impossible for team members to see how they need to connect to others and share helpful information. In my understanding, putting such mentorship in place can instantly result in new efficiencies, creativity, and innovation, which lead to higher productivity and less stress. Such a design would maximize the probability of quality research outcomes through stimulation of interaction and collaboration among participants.
Excellence: The Dominant Element of the Scientific World
The desire to excel has provided a major evolutionary advantage to humans. It is through our commitment to achieve excellence that we have gone beyond defined boundaries and opened new trajectories. Excellence in science, like in other fields, breeds excellence just as mediocrity breeds greater mediocrity. To set up a lab or an institution with a high level of excellence, a good approach is to seek students of great potential or caliber who are capable of achieving a high level of excellence. Such individuals in the course of time would attract other teammates of equal or higher caliber, resulting in a good and efficient team. Recognition of such excellence is a must to keep the members of the lab feeling motivated and driven.
Proper Utilization of Resources
The efficiency of any system as a whole, as well as that of its components, depends upon the input to output ratio. Similarly, the success of an institution or a lab depends largely upon the optimal utilization of resources in well-focused areas that are likely to produce maximum output. Therefore it is important for scientists to economize by sharing lab resources with their colleagues instead of buying them separately. However, many do not.
In the last few years, a tendency to associate quality of research with the size of the grants obtained by a lab from funding agencies has become common. Scientists compete with each other to be the first to make a breakthrough, and they compete with each other for grant money to do better quality research. Thus labs with more funding are necessarily considered to be doing better quality research. This struggle and competition for more funds has reduced the pursuit of scientific excellence. If only we can understand and propagate the idea that a grant for research is only a means and not an end in itself, we can save brilliant minds from getting disengaged from doing good science and from being occupied with evolving better methods of getting more funds.
In summary, I think that it is impossible to design an ideal set of rules and regulations that would allow the complex infrastructure required for doing excellent science. The researchers rather would have to learn to evade or even break rules to achieve better efficiency. Nevertheless, it is clear that better quality is desired more than greater quantity. Quality and efficiency of science cannot be judged merely by impact factor, etc. It is originality and novelty that really contribute to good and efficient science. Thus institutions, labs, and individuals should prioritize higher quality than higher volume of research.
This essay won first prize in COMPASS’s 2015 Writing Contest
About the Author:
Divya is a PhD in Biotechnology from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi India.
