Question: Do you have help when finding your ingrediants?

Stephen Rhatigan answered on 9 Nov 2017:

Yes I have lots of help. I think the time of the lone scientist working in isolation is gone. Everything in science builds on what has gone before.
In research rarely will what you are looking at work out as you hoped or expected. But that doesn’t mean that the weeks, months or years you spent working on something aren’t worthwhile. It is important to let the world know what you have found. That can involve:
“Hey everyone, check out this awesome thing I found and see what it does. See if you can find out any other cool things about it.”
or
“Hey everyone, I spent ages trying to get this thing to work but no luck. Maybe you want to have a go but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
So scientists publish their results; the good, bad and the ugly. That makes it important to read scientific papers. You get to see what others have tried, which is a huge help.
It’s also important to read papers from other fields of science as well. Maybe you will find something in one area that will fit into your work.
But I’m still a student so my first and biggest source of help is my supervisor. He has decades of experience and has read countless scientific papers. With that much experience it’s like having a giant toolbox spread out before you. If you know each tool and what they are good for you can pick which one will work best for the job.
Building up that kind of knowledge takes time (and help).