How are scientists, in the deepest corners of their personality, motivated to carry out the research they do?

Just read a terrific interview with Lee Nadler, the Harvard oncologist who pioneered the discovery of monoclonal antibodies and their use in treatment of blood cancers. In the interview, he was touchingly personal and candid about his own upbringing. And he also described, in a full bodied way, what motivated him as a scientist. Not least was his desire to escape his family, especially his difficult, embarrassing father in Queens.

The personal stuff was quite moving and unusually revealing for a Harvard medical scientist.

What also struck me was his story of his own personal trajectory in science, how events as random as an afternoon conversation with a friend developed into a lifelong monoclonal research agenda.

I also just read the story of Eugene Braunwald's career at UCSD and Brigham and Womens as an investigator of heart attack -- he was the first to develop treatments for people undergoing active heart attacks. He has probably saved thousands/millions of lives. His story is interesting in the way that he is one of the first to bring together in a geniunely translational way molecular biology with treatments of disease.

The father of all of this research was Jacques Loeb, the early 1900s biologist who famously rejected vitalism. His dogma was: All biology can be reduced to biochemical cellular phenomena.

So, having considered all of this, the thing that came to mind was the question of whether "information" or "coordination" based cellular hypotheses (how do cells coordinate activity, share information etc) might be pushing back, however slightly, on the anti-vitalist, reductionist idea somewhat. Certainly the cortical dynamics hypotheses, which sanction action at a distance (through synchrony) and subtle "informational" interactions across many different cortical areas (related to many different subtle behaviors such as observing the pain or action of another, imagining music or sound or touch, undergoing an illusion that a rubber arm really belongs to you). And, then there is my idea that beta and piper/gamma rhythms suggest that brain rhythms extend into (and may possibly helpt to coordinate) a broad range of peripheral physical/sensorimotor processes: pain, balance, movement, blood flow.

The main point 1: how does my intellectual agenda work? Do my ideas, hypotheses and proposed experiments challenge some of these "big ideas"?
If these brain dynamic processes, in which motor cortex neurons are entrained and organized into cortical assemblies that exert influence on embodied physiological processes, then this would suggest a slight modifcation of Jacques Loeb's dogma. I'm sure I will have more to say about this at a later time.

The main point 2: Noting the questions that matter for me, right now.

For right, now I think it's enough to note the questions that I am interested in: why are people really, in the deepest corners of their personality, motivated to carry out the research they do? How are lifelong research agendas launched by brief encounters with a subject or conversations with a person or fleeting personal experiences with illness or healing? How do abstract intellectual dogmas (Loeb's sustained effort to destroy theories of vitalism and promote reductionistic biology, for example) relate to a one's personal situation?

For me these questions feel especially charged.