[javajosh]

Not a joke.

Think of it from the perspective of a kid. Do they want to be a scientist? What is a scientist? (Or, equivalently, the parents of a kid might ask this question.) And they see this list. I'm sure everyone on it is smart, well-meaning, hard-working, and indeed their work is probably of more benefit to society than the vast majority of others. So far, so good.

But with the exception of the cloning guy, I don't see anything inspirational on that list. I don't see anyone working on quantum computing or AI, solving a long-standing math problem, or examining the gravitational constant to an exceedingly fine degree, or examining cosmic background radiation for any kind of communication pattern (which we might expect to if our universe was a simulation and the outer universe wanted to communicate with us).

And of course this ignores really really cool things like, basically anything and everything that would make colonizing Mars a reality (and that's an extremely broad category of stuff, actually, since "getting there" is really only the first problem among many).

Now, you might criticize my list as being arbitrary, and that some people would find "colonizing mars" about as yawn worthy as doing an ethnographic study on sociologists in the field. But frankly, I think that's silly. If popular entertainment is any measure of what the public finds inspiring, then exploration of space, genetics, AI, etc are all quite well-represented.

[mkingston]

"And they see this list."

But why would they see this list in your proposed context? The list is not specifically intended for your theoretical audience, nor intended to contain your theoretical content, but you're railing against it like it is. If the article was entitled: "This article will inspire kids to do science", you might have a point. I will go further and argue that the type of youth reading Nature is actually probably going to be inspired by this article.

If you had wanted to discuss motivating kids into science, that's a great discussion to have, but inaccurately denigrating science/the article like this: 'I can't believe this is the what all of "science" achieved this year.' is probably not the most productive way to do it.

[snowwrestler]

Science is very, very rarely inspiring. Most years, and heck most careers, don't produce big impressive breakthroughs. Success for most scientists means slightly pushing back the boundaries of the unknown within their narrow specialty.

Many kids want to be scientists, but the ones who make it through to become professional scientists as adults are the ones who are sufficiently self-motivated. It's a hard industry; the success to failure ratio is way way higher than in software development for instance.

[eli_gottlieb]

Real science has almost nothing to do with science-fictional technology. This sounds irritating, until you think about the alternative.