William O. Hancock
Pennsylvania State University
Editor, Molecular Machines, Motors, and Nanoscale Biophysics
Biophysical Journal
What have you read lately that you found really interesting or stimulating (a paper, a book, science or not science)?
I have been listening to the Night Science podcast by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher. They focus on the creative, unstructured, and open-ended processes that are needed to complement the “day science” processes of experiments, analysis, and data generation. They interview scientists and discuss their creative processes, and they’ve developed teaching modules on brainstorming and sitting in the uncomfortable, unstructured place of not knowing where an idea is going to lead you and not settling on the first thing that comes to your mind. Biophysicists are trained to be rigorous and precise, but if you’re working on something that’s not important or your mental model is narrow, then your work will likely not be impactful. Students need to learn to be comfortable with feeling stupid—to do cutting-edge work at disciplinary boundaries, then you have to be comfortable delving into knowledge areas you are ignorant of and entertaining ideas that seem dumb or wrong at first glance. “Night science” is a process of developing these very human skills.
What are you currently working on that excites you?
Nothing. I’m on sabbatical at the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and I’m trying to work on nothing and instead open my mind to new ideas. At home, I find it increasingly difficult to find time to see the big picture and get perspective on my lab’s research directions. So, I’m living alone in a foreign country and surrounding myself with biologists pushing the limits of fundamental biology. I’m trying to avoid my normal to-do list and instead learn and explore. Awkward, but exciting.