Oliver Smithies won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007. On June 27th, he spoke to students [at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting] about what he (learned) from his thesis research, which involved developing a new method to measure the osmotic pressures of mixes of proteins:
"Here's my osmotic pressure (measurement). And I was rather proud of this method. And I published it with great delight. This paper has a record, you know: nobody ever quoted it. And nobody ever used the method again. And I didn't use the method again. So I have to ask you, what was the point of it all? Well, the answer is really a very (serious) answer. The answer is I learned to do good science. But it didn't matter what I did when I was learning to do good science. So it doesn't matter what you do when you're doing a thesis, you see. But it's very important that you enjoy it. Because if you don't enjoy it, you won't do a good job and you won't learn science. So all of this comes (around) to the fact that if you don't enjoy what you're doing, ask your advisors to let you do something else. And if your advisor won't do that, there's another solution: change your advisor."
