Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Attracted to the light

My graduate advisor, like many scientists, was not known for his touchy-feely approach to mentorship. But he did occasionally dispense nuggets of advice in the form of a joke. He came out with this one—perhaps told in many laboratories—in response to my frustration at getting equivocal results from experiments that I thought were obvious:

A man who had lost some change on the street at night was frustrated because he could not seem to retrieve it. His friend, wanting to help, asked, “Why do you keep looking in this one place?” The man replied, “Because that is where the light is shining.”

How many scientists keep looking where the light is shining? What do they miss when they fail to explore what’s in the darkness?

I can think of no better example of people searching little-known areas—and striking gold—than one featured in our February issue by Erika Check. In her story “Gut Warfare,” Check describes how, after difficult experiments, HIV researchers have come to view immune cells in the gut as key to the pathogenesis of the virus.

Just a few years ago almost all HIV researchers focused their studies on immune cells in the blood, but the topic of HIV in the gut is now all the buzz at HIV meetings. The findings have the potential to change how HIV is treated and have already shifted the emphasis in vaccine development to mucosal surfaces.

When I first covered this advance as the news and views editor in 2004, I was struck by the fact that some of the earliest evidence for it emerged in the 1990s including a 1998 study in Science. Why did it take so many years for the subject to become the next hot thing in HIV research? Why did so many HIV scientists seem to ignore the early clues?

I don’t know the answer. But in all fairness, the advance required extremely challenging experiments—gut biopsies taken from individuals shortly after HIV infection.

I’ve heard researchers in many fields complain about mindsets that impede progress and restrict grant funding for fresh ideas. Does too much competition make people jump on the same fashionable but obvious project, pummeling each other in the light? I’m not sure what it is, but I do know that as a graduate student, I had a strong practical interest in getting published and getting out of school.

What are some of the untapped areas in your field? Have you seen certain ideas, perhaps easier ones, prevail for long periods of time—while truer answers languished in some hard-to-find dark crevice?

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