Perhaps you wouldn’t think that research on doing research would be a worthwhile study. My first reaction is that it seems a bit like monitoring and surveillance, someone studying the studiers.
However, on further consideration it is no different from time and efficiency studies. Also, as Buckminster Fuller observed, many developments can happen by chance.
If the ship goes down and a convenient piano top serves as a life preserver, that does not mean we should design life preservers in the shape of piano tops.
It should be noted Fuller wrote this long before the movie “Titanic” was even a vague notion in James Cameron’s dull mind.
But I digress.
I read recently of just such a study, studying how a research team comes together and the planning involved. How do researchers find each other and determine compatibility for the serious work they must do together?
“It’s more than just finding the right people with the right qualifications to work with,” noted Lisa Mann, a biological chemist and mother of two other scientists, who was not involved in the research, and likes piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.
“It’s also important to be sure the team has complementary interests, and passions outside the actual science,” remarked Roger Holms, a plant physicist at MIT with an interest in woodworking, who headed up the study and is not much into health food but is into champagne.
I was reminded of something one of my own college advisers said in the 1980s: It is almost as important where you choose to do graduate work as with whom. Can you see yourself living in that place focusing on your studies for several years?
One unorthodox method Holms’ team used in finding team members was the use of online dating sites.
“You’d be surprised how much time many serious researchers spend on Tinder and other dating portals,” said Nicholas Shawarma of Harvard, an evolutionary philanderer, who was not involved in the work, but did admit to liking making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape.
After weeks of interviewing, another peculiarity in the team’s method was to meet regularly at a bar called O’Malley’s where they planned the entire project, and more specifically whose studies they would study.
It was important to the researchers that the subjects of their research not know they were being studied, said Heady LaRue, whose qualifications seem to have been entirely biological.
“I know that sounds kind of mean,” she confessed while sipping champagne at the bar. “But we were concerned that otherwise we might fall into the same old dull routine. And no one wants that.”
The author denies any involvement in or responsibility for anything whatsoever.
I Dwell In Possibility 