Scientific success is built on failure

In many people’s minds, science is about success. Public support for research funding is stoked by discoveries leading to applications, like new drugs or better batteries. In school, science lessons can seem to be about finding the correct answers, in contrast to the arts with their multiple valid perspectives. Indeed, that certainty was one of the things that attracted me to science early on. The more you succeed at getting the right answer, the better scientist you are.

Once you start your own research however, you quickly come to realise that failure is very much a part of science. But even then, it’s often concealed: think of all those ‘failed’ experiments whose results languish in dusty notebooks or in undisturbed directories of cloud computing networks. An experiment might be classed as unsuccessful for many reasons, such as a low yield, an impure product or an inconclusive result. That such potentially valuable information is not shared has long been acknowledged as an issue, as valid work goes unrewarded and time is wasted repeating experiments where the results are already known.