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Posted on March 24, 2026
A Postdoc Reflects on Science, Value, and the Real World
Jessica Preston, Postdoctoral Researcher
Do I add value to society as a scientist?
I ask myself that almost every week.
And if you’re a scientist too, maybe you do the same.
From my understanding, most of my colleagues enter into the profession of biological scientific inquiry with naïve grandeur, expecting to Change the World, cure a disease, make a novel discovery with lasting impact. As we continue down the career path of academic research into increasingly niche subject areas, these ambitions become progressively microscopic.
Instead of aspiring to eradicate an illness, we set our sights on understanding an infinitesimal biological building block that may be involved in a minorly contributing pathway in a distinct subset of organisms.
With days spent aliquoting microlitresof clear liquid from one tube to the next, or wrangling rows and columns of a spreadsheet into an anonymised format, we become gradually disconnected from the concept we are researching, and in some cases disconnected from the real world.
In 2024, at the DDEA Postdoc Summit, we were posed the question,
“Do scientists live in the real world?”,
and requested to tackle this philosophical question from the angles of privilege, trust, sustainability, and value.
Prior to this event, participants, including myself, selected which of these vantage points we would like to ponder in depth among a group of peers; I chose to dedicate the week to considering the value of scientists for society.
This is a fundamental question I debate with myself as I go through the motions of work as a research scientist in the field of nutrition and metabolism.
Will anyone read this paper?
Is this approach sound?
Will this work help anyone – ever?
Perhaps from the undertones of existential angst in the questions posed, it is apparent that when asked if scientists add value to society, my first inclination would be
The DDEA Postdoc Summit is an annual scientific conference with a unique agenda. In addition to the classical array of academic lectures from senior scientists, poster sessions presenting ongoing projects, and networking events filled with academic discourse, attendees are also required to tackle a challenge over the course of the weeklong summit.
This assignment is targeted towards reflecting upon an issue that currently plagues the work life of early-career researchers, and in some cases, presenting solutions to drive positive change within this area of concern.
Previous proceedings from this conference have been put forward to the wider scientific community, in opinion pieces suggesting innovative approaches for reforming evaluation metrics of academic researchers (Attendees of the Danish Diabetes Academy Winter School 2019, 2020) and for overcoming barriers within the scientific publishing process (Dall et al., 2024).
During my week at the DDEA Postdoc Summit, our team pondered the various means by which our work as scientists may add distinct value to the world around us.
The obvious culprits emerged, including performing research that directly expands the foundation of humanity’s knowledge, and engaging in innovative activities with potential to translate findings from the lab into the broader world.
This act of dedicating time to debate the significance of our professions also allowed for more nuanced value-adds to surface. These included our work as educators and problem solvers, training to critically evaluate the world around us, engaging in discourse using data and fact-based argumentation, fulfilment of humanity’s innate drive for curiosity, and vitally, performing tasks with a forward-looking mentality, actively aiming to create a sense of hope.
This emergence of the plethora of ways in which scientists could add value to society was met with some resistance, noting the variety of ways that our current professional lives fall short of their potential maximum impact.
Research outcomes are plagued with issues including a lack of reproducible results, inability to publicise findings other than ‘positive’ ones, generation of oceans of data that leaves researchers drowning, and reporting of findings in a format that is often inaccessible and incomprehensible to the vast majority.
Furthermore, current work within bioscience research is generally exorbitantly costly, both in terms of monetary, human capital, educational, and time resources.
Would such assets go to better use if allocated to another cause?
Considering that scientific discoveries often take decades to become practical solutions, it is worth asking whether resources are better spent addressing the problem with current best methods, rather than investing time and funding in potentially discovering a new and improved one.
The presence of power law was also noted in terms of scientific research output.
A vast majority of the findings which emerge from scientific research are unlikely to single-handedly drive meaningful impact; nonetheless, a handful of discoveries (often building upon previous research) are so influentially beneficial that they more than make up for the relative ‘failure’ of the rest.
It is not possible to predict which discoveries will be the true luminaries prior to embarking on their investigation.
Further yet, it is also not possible to determine which findings, both positive and negative, will serve as the fundamental building blocks required as foundational knowledge for these future discoveries which will indeed change the world.
As funding bodies and academic institutions enhance their push for translational and innovation-centric research, this can be beneficial in the short term. However, it decreases the continuous pipeline of foundational research findings that gradually build upon each other to lay the groundwork for future discoveries we cannot yet even fathom. Maximised value of scientific research over the ages will likely include a push for research across all levels of the value chain, from blue skies to clinical application.
Many of these pathways of exploration will likely lead to dead ends, but nonetheless play their part in shedding light on the pool of general knowledge required to add inevitable value to the discovery of both the known and unknown unknowns.
Yet even with this understanding, it can be difficult to feel that value on a personal level. When day-to-day work becomes increasingly specialised and abstract, it is easy to lose sight of how our individual efforts fit into that greater web of progress.
The concept of estrangement from one’s profession as their work becomes focused on a diminishingly smaller piece of a larger puzzle is not novel. The philosophical theory of alienation was proposed in 1844, describing the disconnect that workers feel from both their profession and the wider world, as we embark into a society with profound division of labour(Marx, 2023). It was postulated that experiences of estrangement from both the product and the process of one’s work lead to feelings of meaninglessness and worthlessness.
I have heard similar rumblings from friends in completely different professions.
A friend working as an emergency room physician, stating that they drive no real impact, helping only one individual at a time, with a continuous loop of the same traumas occurring from underlying societal problems.
Another contemporary working in developing political proposals for the green transition, voicing grievances that their work feels more performative than impactful.
Surely, both of these professions are absolutely vital to enacting positive change for the modern world.
Despite feelings of inadequacy from the workers themselves, these careers clearly contribute to a functional, healthy, and sustainable society.
Maybe my frustrations are no different.
From a bird’s eye view, the work of a scientist definitively does add societal value, despite the inability to see impact from ground level.
One must zoom out through time and space to see how our contributions play a small part in the bigger picture of an enriched world.
So, do scientists live in the real world?
Maybe not always – but perhaps we shape it, quietly and incrementally.
Maybe I have not explicitly succeeded in answering if scientists live in the real world or add value to society.
Nonetheless, through the process of reflecting upon the value of my own professional life, I became increasingly optimistic about the myriad of ways in which scientists contribute to the world around us.
Taking the time to step away from all-consuming lab notebooks and command lines allowed Postdoc Summit attendees to see ourselves, our work, and the broader research process from a more holistic perspective, and in turn, reorient ourselves within the wider world.
Perhaps the most impactful way to ensure that we continue to live in and contribute to the real world is by dedicating occasions to reflect upon our place on this planet, and by remembering to look up at it from time to time.
This piece by Jessica Preston is part of our series of reflections from early-career researchers on a challenging question: to what extent are academic researchers part of the real world? Drawing on insights from the DDEA Postdoc Summit 2024, she explores how scientists can connect their work more closely with society.
Jessica Preston is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for translational Medicine and Parasitology at the University of Copenhagen.
Jessica is a clinical and translational research specialist with a background in nutrition, cardiometabolic health, and human fertility. She is focused on bridging gaps between scientific research and real-world impact, with a passion for overcoming barriers to improve human health.
Attendees of the Danish Diabetes Academy Winter School 2019. (2020). Next generation diabetes scientists shape global research culture: A reflective proposal from postdoctoral researchers in diabetes research. In Acta Physiologica (Vol. 229, Issue 2). John Wiley and Sons Inc. https://doi.org/10.1111/apha.13455
Dall, M., Herzog, K., Hufnagel, A., Ibsen, D. B., Lebiecka-Johansen, B., Ruppert, P. M. M., Preston, J. M., Toh, P. J. Y., & Yfanti, C. (2024). Our future, we decide: five ways to reform the scientific publication process. In Nature Reviews Endocrinology. Nature Research. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-024-01056-x
Marx, K. (2023). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Nineteenth-Century Philosophy: Philosophic Classics, Volume IV. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003320609-19
EAN: 5798 0022 30642
Reference: 1025 0006
CVR: 29 19 09 09
