Failure is Always an Option
Over the past week, my group has been working meticulously trying to finish our project. Unfortunately, some problems with our lab equipment caused our experiments to fail. Among the four people in our group, I was the only person who managed to get a successful result, and even then my data was very inconsistent.
This made me realize how much I am truly on the cutting edge of the field. Unlike in lab at school, failure is always an option and is almost expected to happen. Because the scope of our work is so microscopic, there are a wide range of variables that can affect our results from bad reagents to instrument failure.
However, failure is not always a bad thing. If everything worked perfectly without any problems, they wouldn’t need some of the brightest minds in the world to do the work would they? Furthermore, sometimes the unexpected outcomes that causes and experiment to fail can provide new discoveries. For example, many scientific discoveries such as penicillin and Teflon were all discovered on accident due to a failed experiment. It’s stuff like this that makes science such an interesting field in my opinion. You never know what’s going to happen to your experiment and you’re not going to get punished for failure because it’s all part of the scientific process.
Posted: by Kelvin
Category: Uncategorized
For my i-search I followed my step dad with his pharmaceutical-chemist job. He was trying to make compounds to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, which, if one was even found, would take 30 years to get onto the shelf. He told me the number one thing to get used to with that sort of job was failure.
Wow 30 years? That’s a REALLY long time. Most of my failures in lab just set me back a day. But of course, the competition in this field is so tough that being a week late makes you go from first to last.