I would say most certainly say YES! There's a lot of snobbery which results in ridicule. I'd rather be a Political Philosopher than many other things, which I really shouldn't mention! Not wishing to be rude!

Christopher NOCK

Ok. Thank You.

How to identify those inferior topics and hence stay away from it?

Well,look at where the high quality students go for graduate work. Leave the majority to go to the nonsense subjects.

NOCK

My opinion:

Society values some research more than other research. For instance, the physicists last week who just collected an image of a black hole are superstars in the scientific community. One of the things about being a graduate student is that you are judged based upon your research competence, whether your project was a good use of your time is something that most don't consider. Now, I personally know that I could design a research proposal to solve a lot of challenging scientific problems. However, my major professor might say that whatever I discover might not be interesting enough to publish in a reputable journal which is ironically something that one should consider before embarking on a research project. That is something that I don't have the socioeconomic knowledge to consider.

Thank you Mr. Adron Ung for taking out the time.

I got your point. But some other questions are bothering me. I hope to get a response on those questions.

1. As you mentioned you could design a research proposal on lot of problems. How can you design research proposal of a lot of problems, as those lot of problems would require knowledge of a lot of things.

2. Are those problems from different topics, if yes then how do you identify so many problems? Is there a site or something which lists down major problems in the society? And if there is some site, then how to identify problems interesting enough for reputable journals?

My answer concerns mostly biochemistry and biophysics:

Well, I can't design a research project instantly. It takes me some time to familiarize myself with the system and to realize where the holes of knowledge in the current field are. Sometimes when you read publications, you think "Great. The scientists solved this problem. What's missing?" However, there are some journals like the Annual Review of Biochemistry which at the end of each review article, the authors write a bullet list of unsolved problems in biochemistry. One can then do a literature review of that hole of knowledge to find just how deep the hole is.

The process of solving those problems involves increases your toolbox of techniques. So for this I read a lot of methodological journals like Methods in Molecular Biology, Methods in Enzymology in my field where scientists publish their techniques. These journals are not high impact journals, but they provide a good knowledge base, and I don't find it very meaningful to try to understand the theory of a procedure unless you can replicate it, and these sources contain replicable material.

1. So one basic problem is okay, "I have my protein. Cool! It catalyzes a reaction on some kind of substrate. Cool!" Now cells are noisy places so what does it interact with? So the technique that solves this problem is screen your protein against some other proteins that it might bind to binding your protein to some beads by affinity chromatography and flowing in some other proteins. Weak binders wash out with a salt gradient and if the final mass observed is different than the mass of my target protein. I have caught something which I can figure out what it is by mass spectrometry. This one technique which is a pull-down assay answers this question for every protein interaction. Once I know this I have expanded the whole complexity of this project and created new problems.

2. Now say that using my previous observations, I have identified two proteins that interact. So how do they interact? Basic biochemistry says that structure determines function so I need to get the structure of those proteins separate and in complex. To get the structure of the proteins I need to crystallize the proteins and then diffract X-ray beams into them and solve those crystal structures. This is difficult work, but not as hard now as it was in the 1960s. This takes a long time, but in the end I see in the structure of the complex which residues are in close proximity.

3. Then I do some molecular dynamics simulations of the complex to see which residues each protein stay in close proximity throughout the full simulation. If this is a soluble protein the simulation should be done in water.

4. Then using some cloning tricks I attach some fluorescent labels to the tightly interacting residues and I monitor the fluorescence exchange as a function of time and now I know how these proteins form their complex.

Whether or not people care about what I have discovered is something that I am not an expert in.

People usually think that you become an expert in one technique. However, when you apply a lot of techniques to a problem in sequence you get a lot of information which just begs for exploratory data analysis and statistics.

Currently there are 6 millennium prize problems in mathematics. You will get $1,000,000.00 if you solve them. Actually in mathematics there are a lot of ways to solve a problem. These ones are especially hard.

Thanks!

Could you please tell me which journal do you follow for annual review and which journals for methodologies for improving your toolbox?

This is difficult to say. In my field (Development Geography) I would have own opinion on various topics, some I would just see as a waste of time. In other disciplines, especially in science, I usually cannot say, if a topic is justified, meaning relevant to add knowledge.