Scuttlebutt and Solutions: Why we should present our research problems

by Luke Richardson after MMEG 2025

Occasionally, the life of an academic does feature some excitement: a conference. Now, I’ll take any opportunity to leave our windowless, underground lab (ironically for an algae lab, we don’t want any stray sunlight getting in and ruining growth experiments) so off we went to Birmingham for the Microbial Molecular Ecology Meeting 2025: MMEG. Sometimes it’s the Swiss Alps, sometimes it’s the Midlands. So it goes. Myself, Prof. Pandhal, and the postdocs John and Zongting attended to present a poster, a strong University of Sheffield presence at the open bar, another poster, and a talk respectively.

Research gaps

Hold on tight, we’re going on a tangent. To do a research project, one is supposed to identify (or in the case of applying, be given) a research gap to tackle. There are two big problems with this idea that produce a third problem. Problem One: People have been doing science for absolutely ages, and it is genuinely hard to find easy questions that haven’t been tackled. Two: Nobody publishes their failures. Unless you are really well embedded in a field you won’t hear about the dead ends, as these seem to almost exclusively travel as scuttlebutt. This produces the third problem: Today, a lot of “gaps” would be better termed “graveyards”, where a lack of publications is not for want of trying. This is to say, I think what I’m trying to do has been attempted before and the last poor sod didn’t get it to work either. Combined with two weeks lost to the “Super-Flu” of winter ‘25-’26, I did not have the results I hoped for for this poster. Being behind and in a bad mood, I made an A0 scientific poster that pretty much just complained about how hard research is and all the problems I’d been having.

Is this hard or am I dense?

Bear with me, I’m looping around to a point here. When you disclose failure at an academic event, it can go in three ways. The bad way: you have missed a paper/technique that would solve all your problems and you’ve just been dumb, and may have wasted a lot of time/effort/cash when a solution already existed. The neutral way: Your research is genuinely so unique/novel/niche that nobody in the audience has any ideas, and they just nod along. The good way: Others in your field come up to you later and commiserate about the problems, and you can discuss potential solutions. This is both vindicating and helpful, and can open the door to collaboration and brainstorming. All that is to say, when I wrote my poster I was very candid about all the problems I was having in the lab: Low biomass, contamination, difficult organisms, tough cells that won’t burst, lack of prior art, etc. etc. etc. I wasn’t thinking about the possibility that I was an idiot when I made the poster but by the time I actually got to the venue, I was quite concerned. No matter, I’d already stuck my head over the parapet and it was time to stand by the poster and see who came by.

How’d it go then

If I’d received the “Have you not read Morecambe and Wise 1971 (you fool)” experience, I wouldn’t have written a blog post. Fortunately, my cryospheric colleagues who came by my poster commiserated heartily. Other teams turned out to have run into the same problems and also failed to find any silver bullets. Some good and helpful ideas were exchanged and some emails taken: fingers crossed some collaboration comes out of this. If nothing else, I left feeling like I wasn’t alone in my challenges and with some of the imposter syndrome that compounds with every bump in the road damped down, at least for the time being.

This “blog post” has once again descended into pseudo-philosophical ramblings so I might as well tack on a clumsy moral: Try and have some faith in yourself, and do write a talk or poster or whatever about how much of a pain in the backside cutting edge research can be. In the opinion of the author, It’d be a lower pressure world where more got done if our collective failures were out in the open to be solved.