We need to talk about failure in science

You have full access to this article via your institution. A failed experiment shouldn’t mean the end of a project, or affect a researcher’s future grant opportunities. Credit: Getty Last week, Imperial College London, in collaboration with Nature , hosted a conference on a subject that’s rarely talked about in science: failure . The success of a conference on failure didn’t go unremarked, but beyond the meta-humour there was plenty of opportunity for serious discussions. Science is built on failure in several ways. Scientific ideas and hypotheses need to be tested, refined or rejected to expand humanity’s knowledge. This means that researchers should expect that an experiment or a project might fail, and know how to navigate the consequences. If scientific progress is the practice of scaling the shoulders of giants, let’s not forget that it can be a slippery climb. The Artemis II mission to the Moon, for instance, learnt much from both the successes and the failures of the Apollo missions during the 1960s and 1970s. In space failure is an option — often the only one The conference was a welcome and rare occasion to talk about failure in its many guises. A key reason why failure is discussed so little is because of how academic science is structured. Research is funded, communicated and rewarded mainly on the basis of successful results. …