My Personal Hero: Caleb Scharf on Michael Storrie-Lombardi - Facts So Romantic

Being a scientist can be like willingly entering into a Roman gladiatorial contest. The hours are long, there's a rank smell of indentured servitude, and at any minute your colleagues may attempt to eviscerate you for the pleasure of the crowds. A lot of the time we can look beyond these challenges because we have an innate need to explore our curiosity. Or perhaps (shockingly) because we feel that a life spent in pursuit of knowledge is still a noble and useful thing. At other times I suspect we only stick around because we're playing the real-world equivalent of a video game--conditioned to crave the chemical release from a momentary discovery, or a satisfactory fitting of a curve to data points.