Psychology
fromPsychology Today
1 day agoDeveloping True Resilience: Think Like a Scientist
Resilience is a set of skills developed over time through encountering difficulties, not a static trait.
During the pandemic, many researchers expressed reluctance to share their ideas for fear of professional repercussions, such as losing credibility or funding. This culture of silence is particularly detrimental in critical situations like a pandemic, where new ideas could save lives.
Scientists have long known that vast colonies of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms—a population collectively called the microbiome—live on and inside the human body. But how they influenced our health was long a mystery. In just the past few years, we've learned that myriad factors, from the food that we consume to the amount of time that we spend sleeping to our genes to our home, all affect our microbiome.
Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.
Last November, the UK government announced a bold plan to phase out animal testing in some areas of research. Animal tests for skin irritation are scheduled for elimination this year, and some studies on dogs should be slashed by 2030. The long-term vision is 'a world where the use of animals in science is eliminated in all but exceptional circumstances'.
I'm less interested in topics than in questions, and I'm less interested in publishing than I am in curation. When I've testified before Congress or dealt with an appropriations bill or a budget negotiation, this question, of what is the return on investments when you're doing R&D, comes up quite often. It's been asked by economists in very formal ways since at least the 1950s, but the data and the methods that were available were really not very strong.
Countless millions of nonhuman animals (animals) of all sorts are used in a diverse array of laboratory research. Their treatment varies from being unspeakably inhumanely abused to being treated with kindness, depending on the questions at hand and the values and attitudes of the researchers themselves. The lives of these animals truly are hidden, and most people are incredulous when they learn that laboratory rats and mice still are not considered "animals" under the current federal Animal Welfare Act.