The unfortunate need for specialisation
People love to bemoan the extent to which scientists specialise into disciplines and sub-disciplines. There is a real drawback to this—it makes it very easy to miss out on knowing about work that is directly relevant to one's interests but happened to fall into a different 'pigeonhole' to one's own topic—but I think it's important to understand why it happens and may even be unavoidable.
My own recent experience is a perfect illustration of this: I'm in a phase of spending almost all of my work time reading, as I get going on a somewhat different area of research from what I was working on before. It's not a huge shift, and in fact of the three other students in my lab two are putting together dissertations more closely related to what I'm hoping to do next than what I was doing before. So ideally I ought not to have to do too much catching up here, since much of the conceptual framework is familiar, and none of the biological background is entirely new to me.
Yet there's a huge difference between having a general understanding of what an area of research is about and really knowing what topics would be worth investigating and how to go about it. It's possible to have the general understanding with relatively little effort, and I've managed to do that mostly by following lab meeting discussions and reading my lab-mates' papers. On the other hand, getting up to speed with the cutting edge of research beyond just what these two people happen to do requires a quite substantial investment of time. There are a lot of papers out there, and while one doesn't have to read everything (which is just as well as I'm not sure I'd ever manage), there's no shortcut to bypass having to read a lot of primary sources. This makes it impossible to do so for more than a fairly narrow set of topics, because the only way I'm able to get sufficiently on top of the literature on computational models of genetic regulatory networks is to give myself several weeks in which I do almost nothing but read it; hence I can't do this for another topic without halting my work on this one.
Another illustration of the problem comes from the endless growth of my to-read list. When I read a paper, I usually end up adding at least one of that paper's references to the list, and on average I add more than one reference per paper read, so the list is always growing. Naturally this means I can never hope to read everything on the list, so I have to have some kind of heuristic for picking which papers are of higher priority than others. Many things go into that decision, but one essential tool is subject focus: while I may eventually read some of the papers on Jewish history, Orca culture and the environmental economics of food retail, my inability to stop time compels me to focus mainly on things that are directly relevant to the research I want to conduct myself, even at the risk of sometimes missing things the relevance of which was not immediately obvious. I think the same must be true of everybody, and it's unrealistic to expect any different.
That said, it is still both possible and important to avoid being entirely blinkered by that subject focus. In general, it's more important for scientists to be able to communicate with each other than know the ins and outs of each others' specialisations. It doesn't matter if one suddenly discovers a need for a particular skill that one lacks, provided that one knows who to approach for help with it, and how to ask the question. Keeping an excessively tight subject focus can stop a person from knowing those things, but it's possible to have the requisite general level of familiarity with work outside one's area without the huge investment of time that would be required to really follow the cutting edge. There are a lot of things one can do to achieve this; I find the most effective to be attending public seminars and using conferences to get to a lot of talks beyond just those within my narrowly defined research interests.
None of this, unfortunately, will give me a deep knowledge of more than a very small subset of the things I consider interesting, but that's just an inevitable consequence of having a finite number of hours in each day.
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