How to choose a scientific problem and nurturing young scientists

I discovered the following article a while ago, yet only have gotten around to writing about it now.

Alon, U., 2009: How to choose a good scientific problem. Molecular Cell, 35, 726-728. [PDF] [HTML]

Why the paper resonated with me is that it brought me back to choosing my research topic for my PhD. I knew the topic I wanted to work on for my PhD, and I had a good sense of what the answer was when I started in 1991, but I didn’t know how to go about proving my hypothesis was true. My advisors let me wander for two years before gently nudging me toward the methods that I would finally adopt in my PhD thesis, completed in 1996. Their valuable advice to just “go look at the weather maps and see what you see” is now being applied to a new generation of my students and postdocs.

I enjoyed scanning through Uri Alon’s Web site on nurturing young scientists here.