As scientists, we are familiar with the concept of failure.
The experiments that do not work are more than those that actually do, the papers that need revisions and corrections exceed those published without any correction, the number of rejected grant applications is greatly larger than the number of applications that are accepted. The effort and the time necessary to start seeing the result of our work can sometimes be disheartening.
However, we rarely talk about failure. Nevertheless, failure and disappointment form a scientist’s daily routine, and they are part of that trial-and-error process at the basis of the scientific method.
We are more inclined to celebrate our victories than to admit the defeat. We do not share our failed attempts on our social media profiles. We only present positive results and verified hypothesis, rarely the rejected ones.*
Recently, I have participated as a speaker in an educational meeting for girls interested in pursuing a scientific career. The event, STEMinist, was organised by a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University of London (she is on Twitter as @Sciencythoughts) and funded by the Centre for Public Engagement of the same university, to present women with different roles in science to young refugee women, share our experience with them, and show them that regardless our most diverse social and cultural backgrounds, we all have achieved our goals.
My talk was scheduled to be the first one in the morning; the organiser had asked me to talk about my experience in the different European countries in which I had studied and worked and to briefly introduce my research topic. But I had no idea of what the other talks would have looked like, and, to be honest, I was afraid to fall into triteness.
But when I started to recall the last 15 years (!) to prepare my presentation, I finally got the overall view of my career path: I realized perhaps for the first time, the achievements, the difficulties, the gratifications, and the failures. In other words, I realized that all the defeats that I have collected have brought me around the world all the way to London!
Had I obtained a scholarship right after my Master’s degree, I would have never worked in the Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology with a Leonardo da Vinci fellowship; had I had the possibility to stay in Madrid longer, I would have never attended that congress in Seoul where I met all those renowned scientists. Hadn’t I given up that first job that I did not like, I would have never built my network that in the end resulted in a job offer in London.
The message that I wanted to convey to our young audience was to always believe in second chances, to never compare ourselves to others, and, most importantly, to consider every experience as a learning experience.
I am glad that all the other speakers, each one in a different phase of their scientific career, also talked about their struggles and failures as instrumental to achieve their goals.
Each and every speaker talk about having had, at some point, doubts about the path to follow; most of us had a disappointing first job or a rejection at the beginning of our career; some talk about anxiety and depression, other about the struggles of parenting and embarking on a doctorate at the same time; almost all of us have been first-generation Ph.D. students, with all the disadvantages that it implies.
So why not we try to normalize failure? To educate to failure and learn from it, instead of hiding it as something to be ashamed of?
There are books on this topic (like Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, by Stuart Firestein), in Modena (Italy) there is an actual school of failure addressed to young intrapreneurs, students and unemployed people (www.scuoladifallimento.com), and even a mathematical model has been developed to describe with an equation what failed attempts would lead to successful results.
What is more, Brian W. Jones of the University of Utah, and Johannes Haushofer, professor at Princeton, have released a timeline of their failures!
All these theories and equations aside, I would like to share with you three very important messages that emerged repeatedly during STEMinist, and I hope could help us from a particle point of view to put failure and success into the right perspective:
- There is no set path to success: everyone is in their own very personal journey
- Every experience is a learning experience: what you are doing will take you places (even if you don’t know yet)
- We need to know ourselves and be true to our hopes: the idea of success can be very different for each person, and in the end, the only expectations worth fulfilling are our own.
Embrace your failures and ad maiora!
*(In my humble opinion, if negative results were regularly communicated in science, we may not be now in a situation where the general public demands treatments for a newly discovered disease, or, what is worse, there would not be so many people claiming that the cure for “cancer” exists but is kept hidden.)
Bibliography
A celebration of failure, Loscalzo J., Circulation 2014, http://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.009220
Quantifying the dynamics of failure across science, startups and security, Yin Y. et al., Nature 2019, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1725-y
Scientific progress is built on failure, Parkes E., Nature career 2019 http://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00107-y
CV of failures, Johannes Haushofer https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/Johannes_Haushofer_CV_of_Failures.pdf
Timeline of rejected and successful grant applications, Bryan W. Jones https://twitter.com/BWJones/status/1143616543470710784
Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, Stuart Firestein, Oxford University Press, 2015
Virus&Co. 