Question: do you enjoy your work or do you get bored sometimes doing the same things all the time ?

Daniel Mietchen answered on 20 Jun 2010:

If you repeat “the same things” in science, there must be a very specific reason – it certainly is not the normal case. Even if you always use the same method, you will apply it to different systems (kind of like taking pictures during holidays – always with the same camera, but different perspectives).

And if you use the same system – say the same fossil bone – then you always look at it with a different method (with your eyes, a microscope, X rays, Computed tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Raman Spectroscopy) or with a different focus (e.g. you compare it to other bones from the same skeleton if you have some, or to the same fossil bone in different skeleton, or to non-fossil bones of related species, or to fossils found at the same site, or of the same age, etc.). The joy, then, is in combining all these different perspectives into one consistent whole, thinking about whether some apparently conflicting data cannot be explained in some plausible way).

Once science gets to the “doing the same things all the time” stage, it is usually not considered science any more. For instance, until about a decade ago, there were many scholarly papers published about the DNA sequence of individual genes. This rarely merits a paper nowadays, since much of such sequencing work is now highly automated, and not even every completely sequenced genome (i.e. containing all the genes of an organism) will end up being published in a paper (they all go into databases, though).