Some time ago I wrote a short post to a FB group of Italian researchers around the world asking if anyone would be willing to share his/her experience regarding an unforgettable mistake made in the lab that was powerful enough to teach him/her something important.
I managed to get ghosted! Zero replies. And it made me think. Why is it so difficult to talk about mistakes and failures? I thought everybody would be sympathetic with such a question and also quick to acknowledge that failures are a huge part of their work.
Confused, I moved to step two. I did what every researcher does when needs answers, meaning I googled “Why don’t we talk about failure in research” and guess what? This time I received 258.000.000 results back!
I found out about a 2019 TED talk given by University of Arizona astrophysicist Erika Hamden who talked on stage about a balloon that popped, due to all kinds of failure: sensor failures, mirror failures, cooling system failures, calibration failures and even a close encounter with an angry falcon! This balloon was carrying FIREBall, a special type of telescope that hangs middle air and measures hydrogen particles from which scientists can understand why galaxies look the way they do. Well, not that night, as the balloon crashed and no data could be collected.
In a publication from 2019, I even found a study about hidden failures (see link below). A panel of people interviewed has confirmed that unsuccessful experiences are undershared, although these negative experiences contain useful information, sometimes more than the positive ones. Also compared to positive information, negative information needs more attention, is processed more deeply and remembered for longer. All in all then, bad is stronger than good.
So till here I had the confirmation that sharing failures is important.
However, people want to project a positive self-image and any ego-threatening situation is not easily shared, especially in science, where work is mostly based on grants. It can be tricky to have those conversations out in the open. They make you vulnerable. And of course, granting agencies want to see a proven track record of success before they take a chance on you; they certainly don’t want to hear about flops.
Still, I am happy there are also exceptions to the rule. Just like Erika Hamden, also my good friend Mattia has decided to do failure-outing. Despite the impressive list of publications, she was so easy to admit one of her first failures in the lab.
Actually, she said that failures happen on a regular base in the lab but nearly never makes it to the print. “Nearly” because in 2015 a new movement trying to counter the “publication biased effect” started. The proof of it is an interesting journal called New Negatives in Plant Science. Unfortunately, it has also been discontinued a year after it was launched.
Mattia continues saying that one good reason to report negative results is so that our colleagues do not waste their time and resources repeating things that do not work. And here she calls in a crucial section of any scientific publication, namely Materials and Methods. Through this section, the authors should provide sufficient details for other scientists to reproduce the experiments presented in the paper.
Now try to picture a very enthusiastic Mattia (the photo below should help!), exchange PhD student in a regular lab in Aberdeen (Scotland, UK) who tried for four months in a row to analyse the tomatine content using HPLC as by glorious protocol of Friedman (Kozukue et al., 2004, see link below). But nothing worked. Not even the analysis of the standards.
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry. At first, I was as puzzled as you are now. Mattia explained me that the aim of the experiment was to quantify the amount of a-tomatine and dehydrotomatine, two tomato glycoalkaloids that form the so called tomatine of which immature tomatoes are full of. The interest for this compound is based on its pharmacological role of cancer inhibition, anti-cholesterol, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial (WOW!).
At that time, nothing she tried worked. Anxiety started to spike. Fear of not getting results became very real. And in the meantime months went by. The end of her period in Aberdeen approached faster and faster. The samples to analyze were piling on her lab bench.
So, by a try-and-error approach she started to change one by one each of the components of the HPLC. She learnt to take it apart and put it back together. She started to change every reagent. She also started to question the protocol she was following. She worked long days and long nights, persevering in trying to find where the problem was. Until, finally, the first results using the standards started to arrive. She changed the column of the HPLC and used an inverse elution. It sounds simple but it took her four months. At the point, she decided to extend her stay in Aberdeen so that she could finish analyzing her samples.
Her story shows once again that discovery is mostly a process of finding things that don’t work, and failure is inevitable. She learnt how to develop alternative approaches — how to make a plan B, and most importantly not to give up. Through failure we train resilience which is, in my opinion, a necessary skill to possess if you want to stay in science.
Also, through failure, we develop a so-called growth mindset which is one based on the acknowledgement that talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and input from others. Hence the importance of also sharing failures with each other.
Mattia’s experimental research is one with a happy ending and you can find it published in Molecules (see link below).
She says it is not one of her best research articles, but well it is certainly one with a hell of story to tell.
The literature mentioned in this post corresponds to the links below: Hidden Failures: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2020-eskreiswinkler.pdf Protocol Friedman tomatine analysis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15053555/ The Value of Failure in Science https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.01121/full New Negatives in Plant Science: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/new-negatives-in-plant-science The effect of tomatine on gene expression and cell monolayer integrity in caco-2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29533987/