• Question: if your work failed and you have been hard working to suceed for a long time . what woould you do?

    Asked by merlindavid98 to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 15 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Shane Bergin

      Shane Bergin answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      In science its about reporting what happens as opposed to what you would like to happen. If you have a goal in mind (maybe making a new type of light and strong plastic) then you have to think of new approaches to getting to where you want… you need to ask your colleagues and get lots of hints and help

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Good question!

      The truth is that in science, a lot of work fails. I guess usually scientists might be a bit sad when something fails (maybe this is why we go through so many tissues! haha just kidding).

      But really, failure is part of the scientific process – so I guess we learn to expect it!
      There are so many things to investigate, and different hypotheses we want to try out. If one of them doesn’t work, at least that way we know that – and can tell other scientists to tick that option off their lists, so they don’t waste their time trying it.

      And its important to remember that sometimes, good things can come of a failure. Antibiotics (which we take when we’re sick, and have made so many different kinds of surgeries possible!) were discovered accidentally. And now, the antibiotics industry is worth BILLIONS of Euro!!! WOW!

      But not everyone is so lucky with scientific mistakes, or when their work fails. So we just learn to deal with it 🙂

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      I would work even harder to work out why it failed. The truth is, this is something that happens in science a lot. There are many reasons that single experiments can fail, related to the conditions of the experiment (what the temperature was, if it was left in light or dark etc), or the materials used – chemicals go off just as food can, and, of course, people make mistakes as well. If an experiment fails you repeat it but if many of them fail then you have a result – even if the result is that nothing happened, that is still a result and it’s still valuable knowledge.

      If I think a new drug will help cancer and it turns out it doesn’t, then I can take a closer look at what happens inside the cancer cell when the drug is added to them. That way, I can go back to the scientists who made the drug and tell them why it isn’t working and we can see if we can improve it. If we can’t, then at least other scientists won’t waste their time.

      There’s a famous quote about the invention of the lightbulb – that it took 1,000 experiments that didn’t work to get to the one that did. Imagine if he’d given up after 998??!

    • Photo: Aggelos Zacharopoulos

      Aggelos Zacharopoulos answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      @merlindavid98
      I would feel completley deflated, disappointed and distraught! But I am sure my mind wouldn’t rest trying to understand the reasons for the failure and plan a new route to success. Basically you get up, dust down yourself and start moving forward again.

      Failure is one of the ways of achieving things in science. You can call it “trial and error” method. You learn from the errors and improve your approach until you succeed.

    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      a lot of the time, it takes longer to get your experiment or computer code in my case working than I would like. You just have to keep trying until you get the protocol working though. Shane is absolutely right though, getting to the actual answer is not about working until you prove what you want, but instead its about being honest and telling people what actually happened.

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