Opinion: MIT president: Why so many optimistic scientists are losing heart
Why this matters: health reporting relevant to everyday decisions and well-being.
Most successful scientists are optimists. They have to be, since the vast majority of experiments fail. In graduate school, I remember sitting in the lab at Rockefeller University in New York at 3 a.m., surrounded by stacks of culture dishes for growing cancer cells, none quite showing me what I hoped to find. But glimmers of interesting changes in the cells promised future success and made me feel the experiments&#x A0;wanted&#x A0;to work. That optimism drove me to keep trying. One day, they did work and I uncovered a new insight about a process in those cancer cells that no one had described before. In 2026, there seem to be plenty of good reasons to be optimistic about science: Breakthroughs are everywhere.Read the rest…