What's Your Question?

Alexandra Hartman, ’12, was covaledictorian for the Department of Biology last spring. This is the text of her commencement speech delivered to her biology peers.

What are the three conditions for Natural Selection?

What two ions are responsible for the action potential?

How large is the human genome?

People who choose to major in biology are likely to be the sort of people who derive a sense of satisfaction from knowing the answers to questions like these. For such people, the first years of the biology major can be frustrating: with those years comes the recognition that a good scholar is not necessarily a good scientist— someone who is marked not by her ability to drum up the answer, but to formulate a question.

Knowing how to answer a question is not the same as knowing how to ask one. It is perhaps for this reason that the phrase, “What’s your question?” is so familiar to us (written in red in the margins of a research paper, asked by a faculty member after a formal project proposal, and so on). This question can come as a real blow to a student operating under the assumption that science, like so many other things, is about the answers.

Indeed, What’s your question? is so common to us, so fundamental to scientific education, that it hardly seems worth the pause. But it exactly encapsulates what it means to think like a scientist, and its ubiquity is nothing but a testament to its gravity.

This is an exciting time to be a young scientist. We are in the second decade of what has been called the Century of Biology. Dramatic changes are taking place in the way we collectively regard our health and our planet. Despite this, the amount of scientific thinking undertaken by the average American is on the decline. More and more, our culture has begun to rely on scientists as authorities, collectors of facts, sources of answers. History tells us that this is a dangerous practice: answers, delivered or interpreted as truths, serve to justify the state of the world, rather than to explain it.

While our work toward these diplomas is certainly to our credit, the effort should serve, too, as a reminder of a debt. We owe it to ourselves to challenge the authority placed upon our shoulders; we owe it to the world to discourage lazy habits of thought.

What’s your question? should leave this university with you, as a reminder that science is about the questions, not the answers. It is our responsibility as young scientists—we more than others before— to remind the world that science is a dynamic and ongoing process, an adaptive pursuit, whose value is lost the moment we settle on an “answer.” It is incumbent upon us, yes, to do our best to explain scientific headlines to our peers—but as “informants,” never to dispense just-so stories without making people think about what it is they really want to know and why—because the “answer” is a cheap thrill compared to an understanding of the process by which we came to know it.