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Asked by 07tmellor to Gioia, Iain, Jo, Leo, Mariam on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: Your Research.
Question: How long would you work on an project without giving up ???
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Joanna Watson answered on 14 Jun 2010:
Hi 07tmellor.
Because the work I do is on cancer in real people, studies often have to run for a long time to get results – often studies keep going even after the person who originally set it up has died!
One of the first studies that showed that smoking causes lung cancer (The British Doctors Study) was set up in 1951 and is still going over 50 years later!!!
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Mariam Orme answered on 20 Jun 2010:
It’s a very hard thing to know when to give up a project. Sometimes, when you’re working on a project that isn’t going right for technical or other reasons, it’s best to give up instead of wasting more and more money and time trying to get it to work. But it’s tough deciding when that time has come, and it’s very hard to stop working on something that you’ve already put loads of effort into.
The longest I’ve spent working on a project that I had to give up on was about half a year.
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Iain Moal answered on 20 Jun 2010:
It would depend on the project and how I feel about it. I would spend as much time as needed to know whether or not it is possible. At the moment, I have a limited amount of time to do my PhD, so I don’t want to waste time on something that is unlikely to get results. Perhaps in the future I can work on some riskier, high-payoff, low-viability research.
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Leo Garcia answered on 21 Jun 2010:
Some people spend 3 or 4 years (or more!) on their PhD project without giving up!
It depends on the problem, and if it seems as though there is no scientific worth to be had in following it through. Remember, negative results are still scientifically important, because learning what doesn’t work is just as important as learning what does.
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Gioia Cherubini answered on 21 Jun 2010:
As long as I have money to work on it, unless what I am investigating has already being discovered by somebody else (one of the biggest fears for scientists: being scooped!) or unless it has given enough negative results that are disproving my hypothesis. In these cases keeping going on this project, would be a waste of time
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