Scientists need to talk more about failure

Scientists fail each day. Failure is an essential and unavoidable element of scientific research. This is part of the scientific method: observe, measure, formulate hypotheses, and then test. Of course, this assumption is often wrong. When this is the case, the scientists go back, observe more, get new measurements, emit a new hypothesis and test again. And even.

Despite this, scientific failures are rarely mentioned openly. This is why, when the astrophysicist Erika Hamden from the University of Arizona used his presentation on TED 2019 to explain how his work was characterized by failures, it was a radical act. While she was talking, she sometimes seemed on the verge of tears. And yet, the conversation, whose video is currently not available on TED channels, has not been anything but courageous; it was inspiring.

"The reality of my job is that I fail almost all the time and continue to move forward," Hamden said on the first day of the week-long, usually-celebrated conference. the triumph.

Hamden was part of this year's cohort of fellows, a group of promising changes that are poised to reinvent the world. Most people were there to share their impressive work, to explain to TED why it was so important and incredible to get the attention of the world.

Hamden told the story of a balloon that broke out.

The balloon was carrying a telescope on which Hamden had been working for 10 years that fateful evening of September 2018. The telescope is known as FIREBall, a low-intensity, intergalactic emission balloon. to pass between galaxies. By seeing them, scientists could understand why galaxies have this appearance, Hamden explained, and could help measure every existing atom. (You know, NBD.)

"FIREBall is strange about telescopes because it's not in space or on the ground," she said. "Instead, it is suspended from a cable coming from a giant balloon and only observes one night from 130,000 feet in the stratosphere, at the limit of 3,000. space."

Only one night. You are now beginning to understand why the balloon swelling has been such a colossal failure. And Hamden explained that this was happening, in addition to failures after the failures of that night. Sensor failure. Mirrored chess. Failures of the cooling system. Calibration failures.

"Chess when you literally expect the least. We had a lovely but super angry falcon baby, who landed one day on our spectrograph tank, "she said, adding that despite the damage done by the bird, it remained the most beautiful Project history day because adorable baby birb. "The damage caused by the Falcon has been corrected. We built it for a launch attempt in August 2017, but this launch failed because of six weeks of continuous rain in the New Mexico desert. "

And then the sky cleared and the balloon took flight. "I've got this picture taken at sunset that day, from our balloon, from FIREBall hanging there, and from the almost full moon, and I love this picture," he said. she declared. "God, I adore that. But I look at it and it makes me want to cry. Because when they are completely inflated, these balloons are spherical. And this one is not. It has the shape of a drop of water and it is because there was a hole. "

The ball sank. FIREBall is crushed in the desert. "We did not get the data we wanted and at the end of the day, I thought: Why am I doing this?" she says.

Not getting the data is one of the worst failures that a scientist can suffer. It is also the one that occurs every day. Although these failures are frequent and even important, they are rarely talked about openly.

As a journalist, I often try to talk about failure with the scientists I report on. Although most of the time, they quickly recognize that this is an important part of their job, they are reluctant to discuss details. Very rarely, you get a history of scientific process, in which a scientist will explain all the ways in which an experiment has failed and fails again and again, until those failures teach them enough to get the right answer. If you read an article on science, it is almost always about success – advances, remedies, solved mysteries.

At a certain level, this is understandable. Nobody likes to talk about their lowest moments. And in science, where the work is mostly funded by grants, it can be tricky to have these conversations in the open air. The granting agencies want to have a proven track record of success before taking research risks; they certainly do not want to hear about flops.

"Almost everything that happens in the lab can never be printed. The journal of banal chess and personal doubt confronted with daily life in the lab does not exist. So, a huge part of science is not reported, "wrote molecular biologist Maryam Zaringhalam in American scientist few years ago. "Without failure, we miss a complete picture of science. And, pity, we miss a complete image of the scientist beyond the cerebral stereotype. "

I have witnessed the devastation of scientific failure, as the wife of a scientist. I have seen my husband, colleagues, and friends from various disciplines fall asleep, lose hope, lose perspective when an experiment fails, a machine breaks down and deletes all data, or a grant request is denied . Overcoming these setbacks is unbearable.

And new scientists might be shocked to see how the life of research is failing. "When I went from medicine to research, the biggest shock for me was failure," wrote oncology researcher Eileen Parkes in the journal Nature this year.

The time scale is in part what makes scientific failure so difficult. Data is collected over months, years, decades. When you have spent so much time pursuing a theory and suddenly the data reveals that you have made a mistake, or if the telescope you have built blocks, it may give the impression that the work of your whole life collapsed.

"It took thousands of people and 44 years to put the concept of an idea into orbit. It takes time, it takes a tolerance for failure, it takes individuals who choose each day not to give up, "Hamden said.

University science has a huge turnover and drop-out problem – a recent study found that about half of those heading to a science-based academic career would drop out of school in five years. Many factors are at play, including a systemic lack of parental support and unequal gender pay and prestige, but perhaps this lack of transparency about failure only exacerbates things. Young scientists, faced with their first failure, may feel that they are an exception, their failure speaks volumes about their abilities or the fact that their careers are doomed. This can lead scientists to feel stressed and alone in the face of their failures, instead of seeing this as a normal part of the process.

"Many of the students who started science studies with me changed course when the first failure of a project. Sara Whitlock, a graduate student in structural biology, wrote in STAT about the importance of what she called "scientific resilience."

Learning not to give up is one of the most important lessons for becoming an accomplished scientist. Studies have shown that resilience and increased tolerance for failure can keep scientists in school. But this learning does not occur in formalized contexts at the graduate level. There are usually no courses that teach it, although research shows that resilience-specific training, when offered, can be effective. If it's learned, it's done privately, in conversation with helpful lead investigators, with lab mates who have been there, at home, or drinking with empathic ears. It is rarely discussed on scenes such as TED, or in printed form, or during a career counseling session with potential new scientists.

"I've invested so much of myself all my life in this project," Hamden said last week. And when she wondered why she was doing it, after FIREBall crashed and the data was lost, she thought about Hubble. She thought of those atoms that she wants to measure. "I realized that discovery is primarily a process of finding things that do not work. A failure is inevitable when you push the boundaries of knowledge, and that's what I want to do. I choose to continue. go, "she said, demonstrating the resilience required by science, while giving voice to a problem that every scientist knows, but rarely has the opportunity to hear about it so frankly . It was refreshing to see this conference at TED. Scientific conferences and graduate recruitment programs could perhaps do the same, allowing young scientists to know that failure is inevitable, and that's fine.

"It might look like a failure today, and it is, but it will only be a failure if I give it up," Hamden said.

She will not do it. Hamden and his team will launch FIREBall again next year.

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