> imagine a PhD student who was never allowed to talk to other people, attend conferences etc., and could only read papers and try things in lab. But they can r

> imagine a PhD student who was never allowed to talk to other people, attend conferences etc., and could only read papers and try things in lab. But they can read papers extremely fast. Would they be successful? A lot of scientific knowledge cannot be communicated through papers. This is especially true in wet labs, where there's no procedural standardization. Keoni Gandall wrote an excellent post on this topic as it applies to synthetic bio [0]. I've experienced this first hand as a student participating in chemistry labs. Even when you're given a step by step procedure, it's impossible to predict the spacial logistics and inefficiencies you'll run into when you actually try to execute the procedure, regardless of your analytical preparation. The other type of knowledge that is rarely communicated through papers is the informal exploratory thought process of the researcher, and their embarrassing failures/mistakes. If I have my own lab someday, I think it would be cool if everyone wore bodycams, showing their first person view. By publishing the raw footage with the paper/code, hopefully this would help with reproducibility. [0] https://keonigandall.com/posts/too_much_tacit.html https://keonigandall.com/posts/too_much_tacit.html