Young researchers should not hanker after what is fashionable - the “trend of the moment” - but should pursue only that which they find really interesting, Nobel laureate Roger Y. Tsien said.
He was interacting with media persons on the sidelines of the ongoing 97th Indian Science Congress at the Kariavattom campus of the University of Kerala.
The subject of research for a young scientist should be so gripping for him that he should be willing to pursue it even if no one else is ready to do so. “I love bright colours,” Dr.Tsien said as a pointer to his work that led to the Nobel-winning discovery and development of the Green Fluorescent Protein in jellyfish.
Science should be done for basic curiosity. Science should also be done for useful purposes. One should not and need not be done at the expense of the other, he said.
In reply to a question on the lack of high-tech laboratories in India, Dr. Tsien said he knew of a scientist in the Philippines who studied the toxins produced by a particular variety of snail that killed fish. That scientist had no access to any high-tech facility. In fact, that scientist used to point - only partly as a joke - that his counterparts in the US had no access to the snails that he studied.
In reply to another question, Dr. Tsien said he is now doing research on a possible cure for cancer. “I no longer work on the GFP. As soon as I feel that a particular field has reached a level of progress I move on to another area. I don’t like to compete with my former students who may continue to work on a particular field,” he said.
Dr. Tsien is currently a professor of Pharmacology at the University of California School of Medicine and professor of Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego.
