It is during these times that withdrawal symptoms can set in. Instead, they seek ever bigger grants to ensure that they are constantly supplied with data from their students, staff and a growing network of collaborators.īut, in research, things often don’t go well for extended periods of time. For principal investigators, the appetite for data can no longer be satisfied simply by collecting data themselves. But once a postdoc, the thrill is diminished, and papers need to be more numerous or in more prestigious journals to be satisfying. At first, simply being an author on a paper is thrilling during graduate school, publishing once every year or two is exciting. But the continuous and prolonged grind can easily lead to stress, burnout and social isolation.Īnd, as their career progresses, the researcher begins to build tolerance. In my own field, working every day for a few months at a time is normal since rats don’t take vacations. At one point, she reportedly worked for 18 months without taking a day off. Consider the case of Maura Gillison, one of the talented scientists who discovered that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer. It may involve tolerance, where more data is required to achieve the desired mood, or cravings and withdrawals if data has not been acquired for an extended period of time.Ī research career is often not just a job, but an all-consuming lifestyle. Like drug addiction, data addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder characterized by compulsive data-seeking that persists despite adverse consequences. However, after several years of studying the neuroscience of addiction, I have come to realize that research – the pursuit of data and its related products, the published paper and grant – is often so compulsive that it seems awfully similar to the addictions that I was trying to model in the lab. It was hard work, but it was one tiny step forward in scientific knowledge. The first time I collected data was exciting.
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