Working capacity, curiosity, creativity, ingenuity, passion and lots and lots of perseverance. This is is the recipe to be a good researcher, according to Laura Valle, a researcher at the IDIBELL Hereditary Cancer group during a conference held on November 16 in the library Tecla Sala at L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, in a room full mainly of high school students. The talk was organized by the Cultural Centre of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat and IDIBELL, and it was part of the cycle Pessics de Ciència and of acts of the seventeenth Science Week.

Laura Valle started talking about the steps to become a researcher: the training process, the way the excellence is evaluated, the scientific method and the qualities of a good researcher. Dr. Valle demystified the image of researchers as ​​bizarre, lonely, old and ugly that often appears in the films. She then spoke about his field of study, hereditary cancer, and specifically about the hereditary forms of colorectal cancer. Valle ended the talk emphasizing that the research is a team effort and citing, as an example, the diversity of professionals working in the research group of hereditary cancer.