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Originally Posted by just4kickz
definitely funny... but there's a lot of interesting things worth pursuing and that PhD work can make a big difference.
one of my friends is working at Stanford helping to develop a treatment to allow females undergoing chemotherapy to retain their fertility by grafting follicle tissue onto a immunocompromised mice host. after chemo treatment, they can take those follicles out and re-implant them into the ovary and thus retain the individual's fertility.
that bit of research, might be a small dent in the bigger picture, but it is definitely worth pursuing... and the pictures leave out the impact a small dent can create
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I don't think anyone is arguing that PhDs are without merit and not worth pursuing, they definitely exist for a reason, a very good one at that. I do however agree that many of us, when so engrossed within a particular subject, are more prone to view that subject from an "end all be all" perspective, when in fact there are potentially many more "big picture" type considerations that can fail to be made.
A simple example, perhaps, is people being so focused on "reducing their carbon footprint" and "saving the planet" or what have you going out and buying hybrids - without considering all of the pollution created in the manufacturing process of their hybrid, and the "demand" signal they are sending to the manufacturer to continue this pollution creating process by showing that they will buy these types of products. The small focus is "achieved" in the eye of the hybrid driver, but the bigger picture is that the world would have been impacted less from a pollution standpoint had they just kept driving whatever it was they already had - a " sunk cost" if you will