Question: how have you made a difference to science?

Austin Elliott answered on 15 Jun 2012:

It’ll sound boring, but I think the best answer is “By trying to solve the problems I’ve worked on the best I can, and giving the clearest answers.”

The main ‘output’ of science is scientific papers, which describe what you found and go in journals where other scientists can read them. So I’ve published about 40 of those over my career, and some of them have been read quite a lot – the more people that read them, the more you can tell they were an important piece of work, usually – and have led on to other stuff.

It’s hard to say EXACTLY how you’ve made a difference, because science is such an enormous enterprise, involving millions of people all around the world. I like to think of science as a kind of giant self-correcting wiki of knowledge. Each person working in science is a little like someone editing a bit of an entry on wikipedia – It’s a small piece, but it’s important you do it properly because other people will read it, and use it. And that way, the whole thing moves forward, because everyone’s trying to make the best job of the bit they’re working on.

Another way you make a difference, particularly if you work in a University, is by training other scientists, and by teaching students who go on to be scientists, or become doctors who do medical research, and so on. The two PhD students I trained are both University science lecturers..And among the other the people that have worked in the lab for me there’s one who now runs a biotechnology company, and one who is a University lecturer in Iran, and one who works in a scientific institute in the US, and one who looks after all the radioisotopes in a big hospital, and so on.