We conducted two in-depth interviews. One was with the group leader from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, the second – with the researcher at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence. We also composed an on-line questionnaire and analyzed received answers.

Most interesting/surprising/striking ideas that we got from the interviews

- One of the interviewed scientists reported of a change in scope or level of what she „accepts as an explanation“, namely that, as a PHD student, she thought that she would have to explain everything (bottom up, with all the little details), whereas today she is more interested in a broad, top-level perspective of things.
- Another point was the strong difference in educational backgrounds – i.e. a more abstract, theory-driven education in the US versus a very pragmatic, hands-on, methodological approach of education in Germany (in the biology discipline).
- In the second interview, the topic of the „culture of the scientific progress“ arose. It includes not only high quality education of the future scientists but also the informing of the whole society about what scientific progress is needed for and why it is important to understand and support it. It is necessary to let to know all people about science.

What were the common ideas of the both interviews?

- Both interviewers talked about the importance of the interdisciplinary and international dimension in the scientific community.

“For me the biggest contribution that the internationalism has is that it brings together people with very different ways of thinking”.

“It can definitely help scientific discoveries to be open to other people ways of thinking or their concepts”.

-Both interviewers did not talk a lot about their personal progress. They mainly focused on the general understanding of the progress and also on the progress of the people whom they were teaching (students, workshop participants, group members). The progress of those people they considered as their own progress.

We have two possible technical explanations why they didn’t want to talk about their personal progress:
1. We didn’t ask the right questions/were not experienced enough in conducting such kind of interviews
2. Or the interviews were not enough long and confidential in order to allow the interviewers to reach insights about themselves.




What did we conclude on the basis of the interviews?

It seems that the social environment has a lot of influence on the knowledge creation and progress in science. It seems that it is necessary that people coming from the diverse backgrounds (cultural, educational, paradigmatic) work together in order to achieve scientific progress.

The concept of the personal scientific progress is not really valuable. Scientists with different perspectives/paradigms have to work in close cooperation with each other in order to create radically new ideas.

Maybe, a new scientific paradigm is created at the point where different paradigms meet together.

How does the questionnaire compare to the interviews?

We had the impression that the interviews gave us more information than questionnaire. In hindsight, this might also be because the questionnaire featured questions were to general or complicated; it could be better to reserve such broad questions for actual face-to-face interviews.

Final conclusions:

During our observations we tried to address the question of the role of “patterns and revolutions in the personal scientific progress”.

At the end we came up with the conclusion that probably personal scientific progress is not the thing that could be really evaluated and not the most important thing for the common scientific progress.

The progress of one man is the progress of no one.