I’ve done scientific research not at all, but I’ve been cooking for friends and roommates for about six years. Last night I had a lot of bagels I wasn’t going to eat, so I tore them into small pieces, soaked them in an egg mixture and baked them into a French toast casserole. It’s not a recipe I’ve ever made before, but I did know for instance that the amount of milk in the egg mixture wasn’t actually very important. I think part of this is that I’ve made French toast many times; the simpler the recipe, the more it can be iterated.
In contrast, one roommate of mine is learning to cook, and she’ll do things like carefully working out every bubble of a box-mix cake batter. In my experience this is far more care than necessary, and I think this is because experience highlights the steps in the process that are more crucial.
The recipe innovations I see most often are those that try to rebuild a recipe or a taste without one or more ingredients or steps, like gluten-free pasta or no-bake cookies. Some recipes we understand very well, like bread, and people have reinvented some version of it for almost any shortage in ingredients. Perhaps this could lead to a better development of scientific taste—how would you achieve a similar study if the p-value were lowered substantially, or you had a different sample size?
Several years ago, I helped a family friend, who’s an excellent cook, prepare a Bûche de Noël. One of the small but powerful pieces of advice she gave me that evening was “we don’t need to be tedious.”
There’s definitely the equivalent of “bread recipes” in scientific research. The lab I’m joining this fall is doing spinal cord injury research, and the PI is setting me up on what he calls “turn-the-crank research.” It uses a preclinical test they’ve done many times before, using a small but meaningful improvement in the intervention. It doesn’t require too much creativity or expert knowledge, just a lot of diligence and reasonable planning skills.
I’ve done scientific research not at all, but I’ve been cooking for friends and roommates for about six years. Last night I had a lot of bagels I wasn’t going to eat, so I tore them into small pieces, soaked them in an egg mixture and baked them into a French toast casserole. It’s not a recipe I’ve ever made before, but I did know for instance that the amount of milk in the egg mixture wasn’t actually very important. I think part of this is that I’ve made French toast many times; the simpler the recipe, the more it can be iterated.
In contrast, one roommate of mine is learning to cook, and she’ll do things like carefully working out every bubble of a box-mix cake batter. In my experience this is far more care than necessary, and I think this is because experience highlights the steps in the process that are more crucial.
The recipe innovations I see most often are those that try to rebuild a recipe or a taste without one or more ingredients or steps, like gluten-free pasta or no-bake cookies. Some recipes we understand very well, like bread, and people have reinvented some version of it for almost any shortage in ingredients. Perhaps this could lead to a better development of scientific taste—how would you achieve a similar study if the p-value were lowered substantially, or you had a different sample size?
Several years ago, I helped a family friend, who’s an excellent cook, prepare a Bûche de Noël. One of the small but powerful pieces of advice she gave me that evening was “we don’t need to be tedious.”
There’s definitely the equivalent of “bread recipes” in scientific research. The lab I’m joining this fall is doing spinal cord injury research, and the PI is setting me up on what he calls “turn-the-crank research.” It uses a preclinical test they’ve done many times before, using a small but meaningful improvement in the intervention. It doesn’t require too much creativity or expert knowledge, just a lot of diligence and reasonable planning skills.