GoKawiilFailure is part and parcel of research, but discussing it sometimes seems to be taboo in science. It doesn’t need to be.
A failed experiment shouldn’t mean the end of a project, or affect a researcher’s future grant opportunities.Credit: Getty
Last week, Imperial College London, in collaboration with Nature, hosted a conference on a subject that’s rarely talked about in science: failure. The success of a conference on failure didn’t go unremarked, but beyond the meta-humour there was plenty of opportunity for serious discussions.
Science is built on failure in several ways. Scientific ideas and hypotheses need to be tested, refined or rejected to expand humanity’s knowledge. This means that researchers should expect that an experiment or a project might fail, and know how to navigate the consequences. If scientific progress is the practice of scaling the shoulders of giants, let’s not forget that it can be a slippery climb. The Artemis II mission to the Moon, for instance, learnt much from both the successes and the failures of the Apollo missions during the 1960s and 1970s.
In space failure is an option — often the only one
The conference was a welcome and rare occasion to talk about failure in its many guises. A key reason why failure is discussed so little is because of how academic science is structured. Research is funded, communicated and rewarded mainly on the basis of successful results. There is little room in the research system to recognize what might be considered work in progress, or to avoid penalizing people if things go wrong.
This is understandable to some extent. Policymakers increasingly expect that more of taxpayers’ money — distributed as grants by national science funders, for instance — should go to projects that are likely to provide returns on investment; in other words, results. This approach fails to recognize that things can and do go wrong, and that this is part of science, too. It’s important that when experiments or projects fail, researchers investigate why they did and make changes on the basis of what they learnt.
Yet it is becoming harder to implement such changes. On 16 April, the same day as the conference, the European Research Council announced that unsuccessful applicants for its highly prestigious grants are being discouraged from reapplying in the subsequent year. This measure is being introduced to help the organization cope with a rise in applications. But one consequence of the policy shift is that the council is effectively saying to researchers: don’t bother learning from failure, because second chances will be limited.
‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why
At Nature, we have always considered appeals to editors’ decisions. More broadly in publishing, things are also starting to change — for example, through innovative publishing formats such as Registered Reports. These articles contain proposals for studies that are peer reviewed and the paper is accepted before the data are collected, promoting methodological rigour instead of focusing on results. But such innovations are still too few and far between. Research papers, grant applications and CVs don’t usually include the experiments or projects that didn’t work out.
... continue reading