Natalia Galigniana

[Dr. Filippo Cademartiri @FCademartiri]

This article should be mandatory reading for every medical student, PhD candidate, researcher—and honestly, for anyone who mistakes expertise for certainty.

“The importance of stupidity in scientific research” sounds provocative, almost offensive. But Martin Schwartz is not glorifying incompetence. He is describing the real operating system of discovery.

Science is not built on knowing.
Science is built on tolerating not knowing.
That distinction matters.

Most of education rewards correctness.
School teaches us to answer.
Exams reward speed, certainty, and precision.
You feel intelligent when you get things right.

Research is the opposite.
Real research begins exactly where competence ends—at the frontier where nobody knows the answer, including the people you thought must know.
That moment is psychologically brutal.
You ask the expert.
The expert shrugs.
You assume you’re missing something.
Then you realize: no—this is the work.

You are not failing.
You are standing at the actual boundary of knowledge.

That feeling—“I must be stupid”—is often not a sign of inadequacy.
It is often the first sign that you are finally asking an important question.

Medicine struggles with this.

We train doctors to avoid uncertainty, to fear being wrong, to perform confidence.
But the best clinicians and the best scientists know how to sit inside ambiguity without collapsing into fake certainty.
This is why AI in medicine also deserves caution.
Systems trained only to reproduce established answers may become extraordinarily good at passing exams while being terrible at discovering what matters next.
Guideline intelligence is not the same as scientific intelligence.
Discovery requires productive stupidity:
the willingness to stay with the uncomfortable,
to look ignorant,
to ask naïve questions,
to be wrong repeatedly without protecting your ego.

Most people want the authority of expertise.
Very few want the humiliation required to earn it.
But progress lives there.

Not in certainty.
Not in performance.
Not in sounding smart.
In the quiet discipline of saying:
“I don’t know… yet.”

And continuing anyway.

[Adipose Papers @adipose_papers]

FK506 binding protein 51: Its role in the adipose organ and beyond https://t.co/mjAEoxhTCB

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

Fun and new experience organizing IMB Science Fair 2025! #postertorg #research #innovation #facultyofmedicine #uio
https://t.co/C164efL6g1

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

Innovation Hangout at Forskningsparken last Thursday 👩‍🔬🔬💡📈

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

@ankushoriginal Thank you Ankush!

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

Very happy to share our work on transcriptional & phenotypic effects of #intermittentfasting of #adipose stem cells! 👩‍🔬🎉 Thanks to all the authors, especially #ThomasSæther!
Check out these tough, resilient ladies that stay the course no matter what! --> https://t.co/9jES9oJPM9

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

When you dig your way to work in the Oslo winter ☃️... And you party anyway 🪩🕺

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

Between chairing sessions and poster presentation ~ MolMed Retreat at Soria Moria 2023
#scienceonrainydays

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

Biochemistry Autumn Meeting 2023! #BAM! 💥#betterlatethannever🌹

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

@AnpBellanger Congrats!!!! All the best!!! 👩‍🔬🎓

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

Took our chromatin and RNA studies in adipocytes for a stroll: BAT Energy conference in Hamburg... Surely the first of many to come! 🙂 #BATenergy

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

#EMBLChromatin 2023!!!! ♥️

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

New people, new places, and spirits renewed 🏋️‍♀️😄 Incredible week at #EMBLChromatin in beautiful Heidelberg 😍 @emblevents
#NeverSettle #mind🤯 #newfriends #beer&schnitzel 🇩🇪🍻
https://t.co/qp4ykNOGsP

[EMBL Events @EMBLEvents]

We had a marvelous time with you yesterday at the #EMBLChromatin pub quiz! Lots of creative heads in the crowd, look at these amazing drawings ✏️👏🏻

[Natalia Galigniana @NGaligniana]

In the spiral of 🧬 ☺️
#EMBLChromatin week mode 🔛

[Cristina Fracassi @C_Fracassi]

Great scientific day at #MolMedRetreat #UiO! Thank you girls @NGaligniana @AnpBellanger and congrats for the talk @MadsenOesterbye!

[Aurélie Bellanger @AnpBellanger]

Very happy to have presented my work today about Lamins and EMT in breast cancer. #OsloEpigenetics2022
@collas_lab

[Aurélie Bellanger @AnpBellanger]

Thrilled to share with you that our latest review about LADs and chromatin restructuring in senescence in cancer is now online! @collas_lab @MadsenOesterbye @NGaligniana
https://t.co/tOiM7zJCsJ #mdpicells via @MDPIOpenAccess

[Aurélie Bellanger @AnpBellanger]

I am thrilled to share a part of my PhD work, now published in Frontiers in Oncology. Here we report the existence and a possible biological role of a ZNF217 isoform in #breastcancer. #biomarker https://t.co/TxlmZBcWma

[Wendy Bickmore @wendy_bickmore]

Come on people, We are the authors and the peer reviewers, vote with your feet. Lots of other journals to submit our work to.