I got a laugh from reading this article in NewScientist.  It says in spite of what you might read about science being an “inexhaustible stream of wonders,” it’s not true.  It’s a “long, plodding journey through a dime maze of dead ends.”  Couldn’t have said it better myself!

I thought learning about biology was lots of fun in college, but after spending months looking through a microscope at pollen germinating and years on a snipe hunt trying to find an unmappable gene, I can say it’s not so fun doing biology.  I could take the tedium of doing lots of experiments again and again if the payoff were bigger and more regular.  But for me the payoff was virtually nonexistent.  And I think my experience was not so unusual.

There are success stories about people grinding through experiments which result in a big reward.  For instance Marie and Pierre Curie.  Marie spent 4 years stirring a pot of molten uranium ore to eventually turn out 0.1 grams of radium.  But she won two Nobel prizes for it.  She also paid a price.  She died of leukemia at the age of 67 probably because of exposure to radiation.  Radioactive uranium is so long lasting that even now her papers from the 1890s - even her cookbooks - are too dangerous to handle.  Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes (Bryson, 111).

But unfortunately tenacity and patience are not always rewarded with scientific achievement.  The NewScientist article tells of a biologist who hypothesized that memory could be transferred between animals by taking some brain material and injecting it into another animal.  4000 rats and 17,000 goldfish brains later, his experiments came to nothing. 

Another example is the poor astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil.  He was part of a worldwide effort in the 1760s to measure the passage of Venus across the face of the sun, then to use the principles of triangulation to work out the distance to the sun, and from there calculate the distances to all the other bodies of the solar system.  The transits of venus come in pairs eight years apart, but then not again for a century or more.

“Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit - just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship.

“Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await the next transit.  With eight years to prepare, he erected a first-rate viewing station, tested and retested his instruments, and had everything in a state of perfect readiness.  On the morning of the second transit, June 4, 1769, he awoke to a fine day, but, just as Venus began its pass, a cloud slid in front of the sun and remained there for almost exactly the duration of the transit.

“Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year.  Still weakened, he finally made it onto a ship.  It was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the African coast.  When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate.” (Bryson, 54-55).

Those are stories if flat-out failure, but it also happens that experiments simply give results that are unexpected and hard to explain.  The January issue of Wired has an article called “The Neuroscience of Screwing Up” that tells of a researcher who studied scientists being scientists.  He said 50-75% of their data were unexpected.  They had elaborate theories of what was supposed to happen, but their results weren’t consistent with them.  I suppose this is where scientific advancement comes from. People following up on their unexpected results (or lack of results) instead of tossing them aside as trash data.  The article also suggests that the way people turn those failures into successes is through talking with other people who are to some extent outsiders, in order to get a fresh perspective on things.

Here are four steps to learning from failure that the Wired article suggests.

1 - Check your assumptions.  Ask yourself why your results feel like failure.

2 - Seek out the ignorant.  Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your problem.

3 - Encourage diversity. Find people who don’t share your same set of assumptions.

4 - Beware of failure blindness.  It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions.  The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

Bryson, Bill.  A Short History of Nearly Everything. Broadway Books 2003.