Inverse Knowledge

I've been touting my research experience in my admission assays for the Marist online MBA. I use this experience to illustrate how my insight into the research process will make me a more effective leader in the consumer healthcare industry than an executive who lacks a similar foundation. While I was working on these essays, I realized that while my understanding of how a lab works and what it needs to be productive is useful, the real value in my research experience is knowing what the lab can NOT do.

I actually wouldn't have had this insight if I hadn't been reading Against Method while eating lunch at Chipolte on Thursday. I haven't read the book close enough to summarize the main points (this looks like a pretty good summary), but I have read enough to get the sense that Feyerabend has some issues with institutional science. I have some sympathy with the idea that science may not be the all powerful source of truth that contemporary culture has made it out to be. My own experience has made me all too aware of the limitations of our scientific knowledge. Sometimes the best answer is "I don't know." That answer should be followed up with some ideas about how to get an idea of what may be going on in a particular experiment, but every researcher knows that there are questions that just can't (and shouldn't) be answered given our current understanding of a particular problem.

Of course, going into a meeting with some executives whose experience with a lab has been largely limited to taking tours on facility visits and telling them that you can't solve a problem using the fancy lab that you proudly showed off during the tour is not wise. Nobody wants to hear why a particular problem can't be solved. They just want it fixed. (They also have no interest in things that are not directly related to a product that makes money even though knowing more about a particular molecule or material may be helpful to a real product somewhere down the line...) Having been a research scientist myself, I hope that I will still be able to look at lab problems the same way once I've moved out of the lab and into a leadership position. I know to ask whether the people closest to the problem can find a solution and if they can't (which is a valid response), what can I give them to get them closer to a solution. That's the real value of my laboratory experience in a leadership role in the pharmaceutical industry.