Hit a glitch in your research? Some ‘night science’ thinking could move it forward
From Working Scientist by Nature Careers
April 23, 2026 · 23 min
About this episode
This episode explores the concepts of day and night science in the creative process of research, featuring insights from Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher.
The French biologist and Nobel prizewinner François Jacob talked about day and night science as part of the creative process that underpins research. The former, he argued in his 1988 autobiography, is a “cold, orderly logic” leading to a conclusion of the kind that gets covered in seminars and papers. Night science, in contrast, is a “stumbling, wandering exploration of the natural world.” In the first episode of a six-part series about creativity in science, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher describe how they apply the day/night science concept in their own research and collaborations. Yanai, who studies gene regulation and cellular plasticity at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, recalls telling his lab colleagues to change tack when they get stuck: “We need to snap out of this. We need to zoom out. We need to pop out into the world of night science, into the world of ideas, where we’re going to have to use abstract thinking. We’re going to use every trick we got, And that’s going to give us the way forward.” Yanai and Lercher, a computational cell biologist at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, co-host the Night Science podcast and run…
People in this episode
Hosts: Itai Yanai, Martin Lercher
Topics covered
- creativity in science
- day science
- night science
- gene regulation
- cellular plasticity
- research collaboration
Keywords
- François Jacob
- creativity
- research
- gene regulation
- cellular plasticity
- night science
- day science
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: New York University Grossman School of Medicine, Heinrich Heine University
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