Top 13 rules to do science by the first Armenian Nobel laureate Ardem Patapoutian

Professor Ardem Patapoutian, the first Armenian Nobel laureate, Honorary Doctor of Yerevan State Medical University after Mkhitar Heratsi, outstanding American-Armenian scientist, molecular biologist and neurobiologist; shared his top 13 rules to do science.

We have carefully selected them below for our readers.

1. Don’t be too busy (Rule #1: No excuses. If you are too busy, you are not being creative).
2. Learn to say no (related to #1).
3. What question to ask: find the biggest unanswered question that can be approached in the next 5-10 years.
4. Science communication: when you talk about your work, always start by stating what the important open question is (this is fundamental, but very few do it, related to #3).
5. Prioritize: know when to quit a project (as important as coming with new ideas).
6. Change fields when the open questions are no longer interesting: being from a different field allows you to look at problems with a fresh perspective.
7. Ask for help – don’t reinvent the wheel.
8. Don’t listen to advice if it doesn’t make sense to you (this does not contradict #7).
9. Hire people who are smart, efficient, and kind (don’t forget about “kind”).
10. Champion the underprivileged.
11. Collaborate with people with very different training and experience.
12. Cultivate friends who tell you when you are wrong.
13. Don’t forget why you got into this business in the first place: science is fun. Minimize the noise that causes anxiety.

Ardem Patapoutian was the 9th Nobel laureate who visited the Medical University in 2022. The famous scientist visited the “COBRAIN” Center for Basic Brain Research of YSMU, where he planted the seed of a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana: as a result of the research of that very plant the neurobiologist obtained the molecular basis of the sense of touch .

Ardem Patapoutian was born to an Armenian family in Beirut, Lebanon. He attended the Demirdjian and Hovagimian Armenian schools in Beirut. He enrolled at the American University of Beirut. He emigrated to the United States in 1986. He received a B.S. degree in cell and developmental biology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990, and a PhD degree in biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1996.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Patapoutian worked with Louis F. Reichardt at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2000, he became an assistant professor at the Scripps Research Institute. Between 2000 and 2014, he had an additional research position for the Novartis Research Foundation. Since 2014, Patapoutian has been an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

In 2021, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with David Julius.