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Asked by anon-251693 to Philip on 24 Apr 2020.
Question: How many of your experiments have failed?
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Philip Denniff answered on 24 Apr 2020:
Far too many, but a failed experiment just means that is not the way to go. Thomas Edison the eventual inventor of the electric light bulb said about his work “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” In fact he was full of equally wise words, such as “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” So keep on be in curious and ask why.
Comments
Cameron commented on :
Far too many to count. It is really common for experiments to fail. You need to be patient and everything hopefully works out in the end. Failure it a really important part of being a scientist as it leads to new discoveries and allows us to learn more. Learning from your mistakes so absolutely a key part of the job.
You just pick yourself up and start again
Ozge commented on :
Oh too many to remember! Many more than those that worked!
Soudi commented on :
I cannot remember! It has been years that I have lost the count of “failed” experiments. But, what I have learnt after each failure has been a great addition to my knowledge base. So I don’t regret them at all. It is just the learning path… very bumpy!
Louisa commented on :
I agree with everyone above, more experiments fail than work but it’s about what you learn each time that means you get closer to it working. The bit I enjoy most about doing experiments is trying to figure out what I can change to make it work next time.
Robert commented on :
Experiments should not usually fail. If you design your experiment carefully, then it will give you an answer. It might not be the answer you wanted or the one you expected, but it is still an answer and all answers are important. In medical research (where I work), most experiments don’t actually do what we want, which can be very annoying, but that doesn’t mean the experiment failed. It just means we have to try other experiments until we find one that does give the answer that we want (i.e. a medicine that is safe and helps to cure disease or make someone feel better). As others have said, IF an experiment goes wrong, it is important that you learn why it went wrong and try to avoid that happening again. Sounds simple but actually, sometimes it can be quite tricky!
Andrew commented on :
A lot – but for lots of different reasons. Sometimes it’s because I’ve done something wrong, like opened a piece of equipment when I shouldn’t have. Sometimes it seems like fate that an experiment will fail – a colleague is on her 4th try at an experiment because something always is going wrong like computer crashes, or the clocks changing or something silly. But sometimes it’s because I’ve not thought about the experiment properly. It’s really important to make good hypotheses and think about possible answers so when you do the experiment you can work out whether your hypothesis is true or not. But also sometimes experiments ‘fail’ but when you think about them, the results are quite interesting – this happened to me about three months ago. I was really disappointed at the time because the experiment was a lot of work, but it turns out the result was more interesting than I originally thought!
Catriona commented on :
Depends on your definition of ‘failed’! If you class failure as not showing anything of real significance/interest to the wider public, then 99% of my PhD project experiments so far have failed. If you class it as doing something wrong or making a big mistake, then I think only 10-20% or so have failed and most of those were at the start when I wasn’t so sure of myself in the lab.