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Asked by anon-256709 to Sorcha on 17 Jun 2020.
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Sorcha O'Byrne answered on 17 Jun 2020:
What a great question! Discovering something completely new can take some time or it can happen in an afternoon. Sometimes we’re looking for something new because our experiments and data analyses suggest there might be something exciting going on. Other times, we might observe something in our experiments that we weren’t expecting. In both scenarios, it’s really important to figure out if what we have observed is reproducible and whether other, separate/independent experiments can provide further evidence to support our new observation. This tends to be the part that takes the longest because we’ve got to think of ways to question what we’re seeing and make sure there is not another possible explanation for what we’re observing. For example, in one of my most recent projects I discovered a new cell type that can become a white blood cell. Finding the cell type was pretty quick but proving that it was indeed a new cell type and not something that had been observed before was the bit that took a while!
With all this said, while discovering something new often takes a fair amount of time, learning something new happens all the time in work! When I’m in the lab and chatting with my friends and colleagues we are always talking about the new things we figured out or the data which other scientists have published.
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Comments
Gulnar commented on :
It is a very interesting question and already has a wonderful answer.
I would also like to share my opinion on this issue.
Indeed, discovering something new requires long-term thinking and experience. But, this can also happen suddenly and unexpectedly. The difficult part is to validate that it is new. To prove that something is completely new, you must first do a lot of research on the Internet to see whether other scientists have published information about it. Then you have to repeat the experiment many times to make sure that the same result is obtained.
For example, my main project during my master’s degree was to study drought-resistant genes in wheat and to determine the degree of drought resistance of different wheat varieties. In my research, I studied the DREB transcription factor, which is mainly responsible for the activation of drought resistance genes. Unexpectedly, I discovered a new isoform of the DREB gene-specific for wheat genotypes in Azerbaijan. Numerous experiments and the application of bioinformatics programs were important to confirm that this is a new isoform.
In conclusion, to discover something new, you should think and read more, keep doing experiments, and try to answer the main question.