ABSTRACT
Becoming addicted There is something addictive about research. Its very routines are spellbinding: the search for an idea, planning a programme of enquiry, analysing the results, telling your fellows, hoping they will be as excited as you are, but knowing they will merely humour you by listening. Research seizes the imagination because it is a fundamental human drive that has gripped people from the beginnings of life. No one knows how the first cave-dwellers discovered and learned to use fire. Perhaps they were empiricists like Comenius, trial and error researchers who explored and savoured life at first hand, using their senses, sometimes even losing their life as a result of experimentation. There were no Nobel prizes for the first Homo sapiens to die from eating poisonous plants, but subsequent generations are eternally grateful. A few must have been rationalists, like Erasmus, making a priori judgements and then enquiring systematically to see whether or not they appeared to have substance.
