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Most successful scientists are optimists. They have to be, since the vast majority of experiments fail. In graduate school, I remember sitting in the lab at Rockefeller University in New York at 3 a.m., surrounded by stacks of culture dishes for growing cancer cells, none quite showing me what I hoped to find. But glimmers of interesting changes in the cells promised future success and made me feel the experiments wanted to work. That optimism drove me to keep trying. One day, they did work and I uncovered a new insight about a process in those cancer cells that no one had described before.
In 2026, there seem to be plenty of good reasons to be optimistic about science: Breakthroughs are everywhere.



