The Cave of Adventure

Is it better to live in truth, or to live a happy lie? What if you could choose to forget past pain? In this work of choose your own adventure style philosophical short story of fiction, you are in the role of the main character, a female scientist studying the memory length of fish. While walking through the park you take an underground passage that has a new, and mysterious, offshoot passage to a cave full of fish tanks. There, you meet a child, the child you didn’t have, in the relationship that didn’t work out. The child takes you to another chamber with humans floating in water in stasis, living out their most blissful lives in their minds. You are given the choice, to join them in the tank to live out your remaining days as a successful scientist, with a loving husband, and a child or, to leave the cave, and enter the painful lonely life that lays ahead of you outside the cave.

Is an Artist a Better Scientist?

This chapter regards itself with the verification of theses by American scientist Robert Root-Bernstein who through scientific work spanning decades was able to find support for the argument that a successful scientist is more likely to have an artistic avocation than their less successful counterparts. This chapter takes a close look at three studies by Root-Bernstein and goes on to try and affirm his findings by conducting and analyzing interviews with scientists that have an artistic avocation. The results of the study show that art offers an escape for scientists to reorganize their thoughts. Further, if scientists combine the two worlds of art and science, the scientists can directly benefit from their artistic avocation for their scientific work.

Competency-based assessment for the training of PhD students and early-career scientists

The training of PhD students and early-career scientists is largely an apprenticeship in which the trainee associates with an expert to become an independent scientist. But when is a PhD student ready to graduate, a postdoctoral scholar ready for an independent position, or an early-career scientist ready for advanced responsibilities? Research training by apprenticeship does not uniformly include a framework to assess if the trainee is equipped with the complex knowledge, skills and attitudes required to be a successful scientist in the 21st century. To address this problem, we propose competency-based assessment throughout the continuum of training to evaluate more objectively the development of PhD students and early-career scientists.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).