George Weiner: Press Forward – Advice to Early Career Researchers in Times of Uncertainty

George Weiner, Professor at University of Iowa, shared on LinkedIn:

“Advice to early career researchers : Press forward even though we are, as we have always been, in an unprecedented crisis

A number of individuals, including both trainees/early career investigators and at least one cancer center director, have approached me recently as they wavered in their career choices based on what they are seeing and hearing about governmental policies including those focused on biomedical research.

I responded to them by talking about my Studs Terkel boxed set.

Studs Terkel was a renowned radio personality based in Chicago who did thousands of interviews between the late 1940s and the turn of the century. These are now archived and accessible on-line at studsterkel.wfmt.com. I received a ‘Studs Terkel – Voices of Our Time’ boxed set of 48 of these interviews as a gift two decades ago and still periodically pull it out to listen to select segments.

The boxed set includes Studs interviewing a broad range of the leaders of the day in science, literature, entertainment, business etc including Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, Gore Vidal, Ralph Ellison, Bertrand Russel, Buckminster Fuller, Tennessee Williams, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Aaron Copland and many others.

The conversations cover an incredible range of eras, perspectives and themes. Despite this fascinating heterogeneity, there are a few threads that run through the majority of the interviews.

Many of these great thinkers felt that the moment when the interviews were being recorded was a time of unprecedented challenge and change, and that society faced existential threats unlike anything that had come before.

Topics of discussion included (but were not limited to) revitalizing war torn Europe, the cold war with its threat of nuclear annihilation, the generation gap, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, Watergate, societal inequities, environmental collapse and feeding an exploding world population.

Those being interviewed expressed a remarkable perseverance despite the sense of a lack of control that bordered on hopelessness. In responding to the crises of the era, the interviewees described how they were leveraging their own passion, skill set and perspective to the best of their ability despite being unsure as to whether those efforts would have any impact at all.

Today, some of the topics of these interviews are largely of historic interest only while others are as timely now as they were decades ago and are relevant to our current reality.

Studs, and almost all of those he interviewed in my boxed set, are now gone, but their message continues to resonate. We must remain focused on our passion even though we are, as we have always been, in a moment of great uncertainty and unprecedented crisis.

This is an important reminder for our distressed colleagues. The cause of their angst is real, and the future is indeed uncertain, but that sense of angst and uncertainty in itself is not unique. Indeed, many of the greatest thinkers and achievers of the past century have had the same sense when viewing their world at the time. Then… time passes.

I advise the up-and-coming generation and other colleagues to follow the leads of those who have come before us. Use the uncertainty of the moment as a reason to double down on your passion.

Respond purposefully and energetically to address our current challenges while also taking the long view and thinking beyond the current crisis – yes, there is a ‘beyond’. This may require taking a step back and being creative about re-envisioning how to get where you want to go while making a living in the meantime.

In other words, use your current sense of angst as motivation for setting off on the long and sure-to-be winding path of using your passion, vision and skill set to make a difference.

As Studs himself said, ‘Once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.'”

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