<p>I don’t understand all this stuff on research that people say that they do. Is it significant and makes a GREAT impact on science? Or is it just a plain science project where you have to do research for? Also do many people have prominent mentors and stuff?</p>
<p>It’s just that a lot of it seems like people exagerrate their research. They say it’s like cutting edge research and stuff. Is it actually like that?</p>
<p>I’m doing a research project cuz my schools requires it, but is it really such a big deal?</p>
<p>I think that when these people mention research, they’re talking about doing research at an institution (aside from school science projects). But I agree, it rarely has any big impact on science and is probably exagerrated a lot</p>
<p>Most of it is just research that has already been done at least once by a real professional, and the student is simply redoing the research with maybe a few changed conditions. With the way most of the research competitions are formatted, it’s necessary to know of someone else that researched something similar. I know one student who developed a low cost and efficient water filtration system, which theoretically would make an impact on science, but research projects never seem to get past competitions.</p>
<p>Well, let’s say you’re doing research that could help cure malaria.</p>
<p>There are many approaches you could take to solve the problem, and many ways to contribute to a single approach. Maybe one person could try and genetically engineer the mosquito so it can’t carry malaria. But then some other guy would have to find a way of making sure this gene spread throughout the entire population. Some guy might test this in fruit flies; another via computer simulation; still another might go out in the wild and test it in real mosquitoes. A bunch of people might be working on a broader theoretical problem with applications to curing malaria.</p>
<p>And then you’ve got to account for all the people who aren’t thinking about mosquitoes at all. Maybe they’re trying to make a cheap, effective vaccine that protects against malaria. Or maybe they’re using nanotechnology to design extremely cheap, comfortable, lightweight protective netting.</p>
<p>And then you have to account for all the people who try at these tasks, and fail. Most research doesn’t end up working out. Often you’ll have some sort of really straightforward plan for what you want to do, but then you realize there are complications involved, and your plan ends up taking forever or not working at all (you can’t find decent software, your cells are dying, your experiments just aren’t working for some reason or another, your plan was bad to begin with, etc.). Getting your research to work is even harder than ascending in NetHack.</p>
<p>Yet everyone involved gets to tell all their friends they helped cure malaria – that’s because they all contributed to the cause, in their own little way. With things like curing cancer, you’ve got even more people working on the project, since there are so many different types of cancer. So basically, you end up with a lot of people working on cutting-edge research (the key word being “working on”).</p>