Content area
Full Text
About the Authors:
Benhur Lee
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Department of Microbiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0760-1709Citation: Lee B (2018) The quest for good explanations. PLoS Pathog 14(3): e1006818. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006818
Editor: Glenn F. Rall, The Fox Chase Cancer Center, UNITED STATES
Published: March 8, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Benhur Lee. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: Support for the work described was provided by NIH R01-AI069317, R01-AI125536, R01-AI123449, and a subaward from the Pacific Southwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease (U54-AI065359). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
"...all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations."
-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (2012)
I often tell people that if I didn’t have to work for a living, I would still be doing what I’m doing. It is an unbelievable privilege to be an academic scientist, paid to work on your passion, to follow up on your curiosity, to inspire and be inspired by generations of graduate students and post-docs that pass through your lab. So how did I end up being a scientist, doing what I love for a living?
I grew up in Singapore in the 1970s and early 1980s. I was educated in a school system that encouraged the rote memorization of facts. Science, as it was taught in my high school, didn’t allow room for questions that might lead to independent thinking. Facts had to be learned only well enough to pass examinations. If one did well in science, one went to medical school. One only saw scientists in movies, never in real life.
When I was 17, I went off to college in America, and my eyes were opened. I remember writing in wonder to my friends back home to tell them about a time in freshman chemistry...