As the title says. Work is stressful when you’re not sure if you’re looking in the right direction. We have a lot of seemingly contradictory data coming in from our experiments, but those contradictions are hopefully pushing us in the direction of new science. Just how the shape of proteins relates to their disease states is still new ground, and I’m proud to be working in it. But it’s a difficult field to get data in.

I sometimes look back and wish I could have worked in an earlier time. You look at say Gregor Mendel’s pea plants and you think that that would have been a scientific endeavor you could do easily. Or discovering new elements in the 19th century when all you needed was an atomic mass and the mass ratios of an oxygen and fluorine salt. I think back and that research seems so much easier, since high school kids replicate some of those experiments today.

But I know it isn’t so simple. It’s easy to replicate those things first because we know what we’re looking for, and second because our technology is so much better. Finding the structure of benzene is a classic case, students learn how to draw benzene very early on in an organic chemistry class, but its structure confounded the best and brightest for decades in the 19th century. They didn’t have the accuracy of scales we do, the easy access to light-based detection methods, or nuclear based detection methods, hell they didn’t even have a theory of protons and neutrons. They knew Carbon and Hydrogen existed, but they weren’t in any way sure how to fit those onto a periodic table yet, and weren’t certain there wasn’t some new element hiding around in Benzene. Putting together an experiment to prove the structure of benzene, using only 19th century knowledge and 19th century technology, is a lot harder than it sounds, and me wishing I could have worked on that discovery instead of my current one is “grass-is-greener-ism.”

Another good one for any discussion: we often laugh at those silly medievals who believed the sun goes around the earth. I mean, even some Greek philosophers proposed it, but alas the medievals were just too closed-minded, right? But actually the geocentric theory did seem to be parsimonious for a good long while. Here’s a fun thought experiment: how would you prove geocentricism using only what you could find in the 10th century? No telescope, no pictures from orbit, just observations of the sky. If you know your astronomy you know there are certain irregularities with the orbits of planets as viewed from earth, and that is a good argument against geocentricism. Yet it was also noted that there is no perception of movement when one is standing on the earth, and that was taken as an argument against heliocentricism. It wasn’t until Galileo’s theory of relative motion that a cogent counter-argument was put in place, and so if you want to prove heliocentricism in the 10th century you’d also have to do the hard work of demonstrating relativity like Galileo did. Copernicus’s model of heliocentricism is often seen as revolutionary, but it still had endless epicycles needed to explain it, more even than geocentricism, making it not that much better than Ptolemy’s geocentricism, so if you want to argue for heliocentricism by attacking epicycles you’d also need to do the hard math that Kepler did in establishing how orbits can be calculated based on ellipses. It really isn’t as easy a problem as it sounds.

So yeah, work is hard but I guess it’s always been hard. We think all the easy discoveries have been made, but those discoveries were made when they were hard to make.