Microbiologist interview

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             Eventually she will have different topics within her general topic to focus her research on. It is important to realize that Whitney's main topic is a question that she wants answered, so she is searching for the answer to that question and uses the initial research to come up with her hypothesis of what may happen. "The goal in science is to use scientific techniques and experiments to "tell a story"," Whitney clarifies. Each paper a scientist writes is referred to as a story of how things happen in that biological field, so the paper must be organized in a story like fashion. .
             Her next step is to determine which is the best order to present the research as well as her data so it logically makes sense and proves what she is trying to show. When she actually gets to writing, she has already done a great deal of the reading and experiments to tell the story about her topic. However, she usually finds that certain ideas or information end up missing, " so I go back and read about a little topic that I didn't think about.or do another experiment to show something more clearly." To clarify what Whitney was saying, I asked how she decides on what research to use in the paper and what to discard. She reminded me about the "story", and whether it fits in with what she was saying or if it was relevant to her point. .
             It is logical to wonder that if there are already hundreds of papers on a certain topic, then wouldn't most of them say the same thing; and how would she prevent herself from saying something similar to what someone else did? Whitney's response to this was that a lot of papers do say the same thing, but its part of the job to try and add something new each time, or to add onto everyone else's story. "You have to do more experiments to find new things. It always involves more experiments that are more specific or look at more things or look at it differently or use a different technique to show it.