Forestry sees the result 20-100 years later.
Farming sees the result in the matter of months to relatively short (1-5) years.
Fishing/hunting sees the result in the matter of hours, days and weeks.
Overall, most relevant time span for medical research that I do is the "farming" time span of months-years. Excitement of hunting helps to run short term experiments, and thinking of the future science and imagining the development would be the joy of forestry.
For my recent research projects, there were two outside grants that supported them. The projects generated data and results. Now I am sitting on these pile of data, and working on translating the data to results, then manuscript, and publication.
During the project running phase, when we did experiments and accumulated samples, data and results, they were not at a stage that we could publish them. It takes a certain amount of results to write up manuscripts and publish them.
There are distinct phases in research. While you are still running experiments, you don't see the end products---publications. They can come in months ahead.
Using the analogy of farming, when you are planting rice in paddy field in May, you cannot get the rice grains. Not even in July when you are tending and fertilizing them. You have to wait until autumn to harvest.
In recent months I am going through a harvest season for the projects. I got two manuscripts accepted and they are in press now. I am working on another manuscript. The contents are going to be presented in upcoming American Association for Cancer research (AACR) annual meeting on April in a Mini symposium session, so I got to hurry. Following is the other manuscript. I better focus on sending them out as publications as soon as possible.
It is a good way to be busy. It is a fun time.
But I got to remember to plant new seeds, too.
Some collaborative works are getting submitted as manuscripts by collaborators. Hope they get published as well. Collaboration is one of a few ways to leverage your work.
