Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

Scientist career: experimentalist and/or theoretician

Author: Danut Dragot, PhD

The actual level of the society we live in depends on the prior progress done by all member of the society in which we include the scientists with two distinct branches: the experimentalist and the theoretician. In the past, according with the history of sciences the experimentalist and theoretician was the same person. Today there is a split between the two due to a deep division of work that is imposed by complexity of work, complexity of products, and complexity of thoughts.
One important aspect of the work of the experimentalist is that it is well appreciated among anyone involved on producing real things like: cars, planes, machinery, computers, iPhones, houses, etc. The work of theoretician is also appreciated by scientists, teachers, researchers, and less appreciated by product developers or tool refiners for machines and mundane installations because simply their theory doesn’t directly apply to that particular field. This aspect of appreciation, in which I believe is related to the level of education, becomes a subjective factor. It depends on how well key people in the social chain of development are thinking on doing things better with the goal to get the fastest pace on progress.
For a society to grow, it is important to unite all possible constructive factors in one productive direction. This process is like unifying all known physical fields in one self-consistent theory that will explain everything. Unfortunately, this scientific event did not practically happen yet. However, corrective patches exist that explain why today some categories of professionals get busier and new professions appear branching farther on the division of the work, that ignites new opportunities for many with a good cause. As we know, the capacity of brain to process information is very high, therefore a straightforward solution for the society to keep fast pace on progress is to produce highly qualified individuals to deal with these problems. The experimentalist and the theoretician started to play an important role on this historic development path. In free societies, like ours, the accommodation of all disciplines is based on competition that drives the will of people to pursue the career in the direction where theirs skills are maximized and their talents recognized. It looks like today, many people put a lot of credit on their education, many of them qualifying for two or more disciplines on the market competition. As a fact, today we cannot see often the two skills of the experimentalist and the theoretician together for a single individual. Not because the life is too short, but because there seems to be a limitation in understanding different or opposite things. In the history of sciences and arts we saw that the math does not stick with some degree with the arts. However, great people managed both skills like Aldous Huxley, who beautifully explained in a narrated manner, the Pythagorean Theorem in the story titled “Young Archimedes”.
An obvious practical question is what we can do when the competition is touching all of us, scientists, as well as non-scientists, with complex question imposed by actual technological level of the society? The solution is go back to the school! Read as much as you can, ask passionately a scientist, a doctor, a friend, a teacher, an engineer, a physicist. Be realist on what you know and how much you know. New players are coming for sure, irrespective of age, social position, or educational strength. Let’s give all candidates a chance to compete fairly, without prejudgments, and have great respect for all of them.