Judit Burgaya Ventura, Hannes Sommer, Thu-Hien Vu
22 October 2024
Last week we (Hannes, Hien, and Judit) attended the annual meeting of all doctoral students from the
Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI),
which took place at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI)
in Würzburg.
The event provided an excellent opportunity for us to network and discuss both current and future challenges in infection research.
A highlight of the meeting was the “Night Science Workshop”, led by Itai Yanai (NYU).
The workshop focused on the creative side of scientific discovery, exploring how new hypotheses and questions arise and how creativity drives the scientific progress.
The term “night science” was initially described by François Jacob (a Nobel Prize winning biologist).
In his autobiography he wrote:
Night science wanders blindi. It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start.
Doubting everything, it is forever trying to find itself, question itself, pull itself back together.
Night science is a sort of workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of
science is worked out.
Following this idea, we were able to practice our creative thinking, improvisation skills and
idea exploration, through different exercises. One example exercise, which was more challenging than expected,
was to explain our project to another person who does not know anything about it, in “day science” speak first,
and then try to translate it into “night science” speak. The “night science”-language is less rigid in
its description of scientific processes, often using metaphors and analogies, making it more accessible
to people without niche scientific knowledge (something similar to what we did in our last lab retreat).
As young researchers, we are mostly taught the language of “day science”, unaware of the
“night science”-aspect of research, which allows us to gather ideas more freely
and provides a safe space to generate hypotheses without the usual restraints of formal scientific correctness.
The meeting also covered the aspects of “day science”, by having the opportunity to present a poster
on our lab’s research and methods. Additionally, Judit could present part of her PhD project,
in particular the “microGWAS pipeline”,
which has been developed together with Bamu, Jenny and Marco, and recently submitted as a preprint.
Overall, it was a great experience, and we definitely recommend the other HZI’s graduate students
attending next year’s assembly, which is likely taking place at Twincore, our own turf!
