• Question: What's your worldview? Like what moral system to do you subscribe to and how does the field you work in or the scientific method itself affect it?

    Asked by anon-320324 on 1 Apr 2022.
    • Photo: Mary Clarke

      Mary Clarke answered on 10 Mar 2022:

      My one big view at the moment is how laboratory work affects the environment. Biology (and probably the other sciences) use a lot of plastic. There has to be a way to reduce the amount of plastic that is thrown away from the lab. I am actively trying to instigate a better way of working / recycling at our institution.

    • Photo: Rebecca Davies

      Rebecca Davies answered on 10 Mar 2022:

      I try my best to be a good person. This works for science as you need to be truthful about reporting your work. However there are some things in science that can conflict this – for example work in animal models or animal derived products that we use to do science experiments. This can make me feel a bit guilty, and many people are working on other ways to do this, but it does help make lives better. It is also regulated and must be justified.

    • Photo: Amy Worrall

      Amy Worrall answered on 10 Mar 2022:

      That’s a big question! I try to be quite environmentally conscious but as @Mary said biology uses a lot of plastic! I try to counteract this by using reusable items wherever possible, but I’d love to help in working towards plastic waste in the lab.

    • Photo: Emily Clarke

      Emily Clarke answered on 11 Mar 2022:

      Always be a good person. Try to do the right thing by other people. But also make sure yiu create an environment that is supportive and welcoming, where people feel comfortable asking questions and learning.

    • Photo: Elpida Vounzoulaki

      Elpida Vounzoulaki answered on 11 Mar 2022:

      That’s a big question! My worldview is kindness, being a good person. Whatever I do I always aim for that. 🙂

    • Photo: Chigozie Onuba

      Chigozie Onuba answered on 11 Mar 2022:

      My world view is do unto others how you would like to be treated. Treat people with kindness and respect.
      The field I work in promotes and shares best practice of being kind, Respectful and responsible which is linked to my world view.

    • Photo: Kerry Ann Brown

      Kerry Ann Brown answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      Thoughtful question! I try to do my best and make the world a bit of a better place in anyway I can.

      My work is related to sustainable diets in the UK but also globally. I work with international teams and often need to travel. This causes me a conflict, as I would like to minimise my air travel! So, as a team we think creatively about how we can engage with each other over different online platforms. My colleague Pauline designed a whole online world (like a computer game) for us to hold a remote conference – with different rooms etc. Also when I visit my colleagues in India I tend to go for a month at a time to justify the travel.

    • Photo: Rebecca Locke

      Rebecca Locke answered on 16 Mar 2022:

      That’s a tough question! I would probably say a worldview of wherever you go you should leave things a little better than how you found it. I work in helping to diagnose genetic conditions, so I like to think that everything I do is going to improve the life of a patient, even if in a small way. I’ve done other jobs in the past where it wasn’t obvious how they helped people, and I didn’t find them half as rewarding 🙂

    • Photo: James Blackshaw

      James Blackshaw answered on 4 Apr 2022:

      In the last year or so, I’ve got a lot out of Stoicism, on account of it being a really accessible set of tools for calming down and doing the job in front of you. Turns out that some classical philosophy is super easy-to-read because they weren’t trying to be fancy. And because “separate the things you can control from those that you can’t” sounds awfully like some of the central principles of designing a scientific experiment or debugging software.

      Which makes it a bit of a shame that “stoic” with a small s has changed in common English to mean “unfeeling and kind of passive” rather than “thoughtful, reflective, engaged in society and proactive”.

      It’s also oddly reassuring to know that people were trying to not get angry at jerks in the shop 2000 years go, and and that even a Roman emperor had a diary that regularly contained notes on the theme of “My job sucks and this is how I deal with it”. That’s ‘The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius’. Great read, slightly weird one because he never intended to publish it, someone just started making copies of his diary after he died.

      So yeah. It’s all been an inspiration to spend more time doing something useful. Like this project here.

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