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How researchers can cultivate patience, according to University of Houston expert

Usually, research takes time and patience — here are some tips for cultivating patience. Graphic byMiguel Tovar/University of Houston

Aristotle, one of the most famous philosophers and scientists of all time, once said, "Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet."

What the phrase conveys is all too familiar to those in the scientific community. Patience needs to be cultivated by researchers who wait for the outcome of their studies. History is full of success stories of the science community showing both patience and persistence.

Quitters never prosper

Patience is essentially the ability to stay relatively unruffled in the face of adversity. Earning a Ph.D. takes time, writing grants and getting funding takes time, and experiments – some of them never yield results or take a long time to do so.

For example, there is the story of the two scientists who discovered the HPV virology, which eventually led to routine tests that check for cervical cancer in women. They were studying and researching the bacteria that causes the HPV virus for nearly 13 years before their findings were accepted. "In January 1928, Dr. George N. Papanicolaou first announced his findings at the Third Race Betterment Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan, but these were met with skepticism and resistance from the scientific community. This rejection did not deter Dr. Papanicolaou from continuing his research in this field in 1939, until eventually his findings were published on March 11, 1941," wrote Ioannis N. Mammas and Demetrios A. Spandidos in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine.

This is by no means the only example – many researchers face setbacks and long experimentation periods that seemingly go nowhere, making any outcome at all even more sacred.

A marshmallow now…

A new study by Adrianna Jenkins, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher, and Ming Hsu, an associate professor of marketing and neuroscience at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, is making headway in determining whether willpower is actually the way one overcomes adversity or if patience is born of something else. We know the famous marshmallow test, where young children were told they could have one marshmallow right away or two marshmallows if they waited a short time. Thirty years later, the children with better impulse control were more successful than their counterparts who had little self-control.

The newer study works like this: "The actual reward outcomes were identical, but the way they were framed differed. For example, under an "independent" frame, a participant could receive $100 tomorrow or $120 in 30 days. Under a "sequence" frame, a participant had to decide whether to receive $100 tomorrow and no money in 30 days or no money tomorrow and $120 in 30 days." More on this later.

As one might guess, the ones who showed delayed gratification were the ones using their imaginations the most: "Participants in the sequence frame reported imagining the consequences of their choices more than those in the independent frame. One participant wrote, 'It would be nice to have the $100 now, but $20 more at the end of the month is probably worth it because this is like one week's gas money.''

Willing yourself patient?

So how does willpower play into the equation? "Whereas willpower might enable people to override impulses, imagining the consequences of their choices might change the impulses," Jenkins says. "People tend to pay attention to what is in their immediate vicinity, but there are benefits to imagining the possible consequences of their choices."

Researchers may not think of themselves as particularly creative, but an imagination is definitely needed to frame hypotheses and conduct experiments, so one could argue that scientists are perhaps some of the most creative, imaginative people around.

The Big Idea

Waiting is still a drag, right?

In The Greater Good, a University of California – Berkeley science magazine, there were three concrete steps to help your research become even more fulfilling and make you more patient as an investigator: mindfulness, reframing the situation and being grateful.

First, mindfulness. Mindfulness techniques include things as simple as acknowledging you are overwhelmed or frustrated with a co-PI. It lets you deal better and leads to the second step, which is reframing the situation in a positive light. And, remember the $120 scenario? Those who were grateful for the amount of money they were receiving did better at delaying gratification, according to the study.

So, when you're working on your latest research, don't forget to practice patience. The fruits will taste even sweeter once the obstacles are endured, one by one.

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This article originally appeared on the University of Houston's The Big Idea. Sarah Hill, the author of this piece, is the communications manager for the UH Division of Research.

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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