Planning to Learn About Protein Structure

Human scientists actively seek out information that bears on questions they have decided to pursue. They design experiments, explore the implications of the knowledge they have, refine their questions and test alternative ideas. Although many discoveries are the result of unexpected observations, these surprises take place in the context of an explicit pursuit of knowledge. Viewing scientific discovery as a kind of motivated action raises some basic issues common to goal-directed behavior generally: Where do desires (to know) come from? What are the actions that can be taken (to discover)? What are the resources those actions consume, and how are they allocated? How are decisions about selecting and combining actions made?