{"id":603086,"date":"2026-04-24T06:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T06:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/603086\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T06:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T06:14:14","slug":"we-need-to-talk-about-failure-in-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/603086\/","title":{"rendered":"We need to talk about failure in science"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n You have full access to this article via your institution.<\/p>\n

\"Five<\/p>\n

A failed experiment shouldn\u2019t mean the end of a project, or affect a researcher\u2019s future grant opportunities.Credit: Getty<\/p>\n

Last week, Imperial College London, in collaboration with Nature, hosted a conference on a subject that\u2019s rarely talked about in science: failure<\/a>. The success of a conference on failure didn\u2019t go unremarked, but beyond the meta-humour there was plenty of opportunity for serious discussions.<\/p>\n

Science is built on failure in several ways. Scientific ideas and hypotheses need to be tested, refined or rejected to expand humanity\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> during the 1960s and 1970s.<\/p>\n

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In space failure is an option \u2014 often the only one<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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. There is little room in the research system to recognize what might be considered work in progress, or to avoid penalizing people if things go wrong.<\/p>\n

This is understandable to some extent. Policymakers increasingly expect that more of taxpayers\u2019 money \u2014 distributed as grants by national science funders, for instance \u2014 should go to projects that are likely to provide returns on investment<\/a>; in other words, results. This approach fails to recognize that things can and do go wrong, and that this is part of science, too. It\u2019s important that when experiments or projects fail, researchers investigate why they did and make changes on the basis of what they learnt.<\/p>\n

Yet it is becoming harder to implement such changes. On 16 April, the same day as the conference, the European Research Council announced that unsuccessful applicants for its highly prestigious grants are being discouraged from reapplying in the subsequent year. This measure is being introduced to help the organization cope with a rise in applications. But one consequence of the policy shift is that the council is effectively saying to researchers: don\u2019t bother learning from failure, because second chances will be limited.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Disruptive\u2019 science has declined \u2014 and no one knows why<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

At Nature, we have always considered appeals to editors\u2019 decisions. More broadly in publishing, things are also starting to change \u2014 for example, through innovative publishing formats such as Registered Reports<\/a>. These articles contain proposals for studies that are peer reviewed and the paper is accepted before the data are collected, promoting methodological rigour instead of focusing on results. But such innovations are still too few and far between. Research papers, grant applications and CVs don\u2019t usually include the experiments or projects that didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n

This failure of the research enterprise to provide the time and space for individuals to fail without fear of the consequences risks failure of a grander kind. On a broader scale, it might be one reason why studies seem to show that research is becoming less \u2018disruptive\u2019<\/a> of established ideas (M. Park et al. Nature 613, 138\u2013144; 2023<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Can we learn from research outside academia? In Silicon Valley, for example, failure is famously \u2018hard-wired\u2019. A \u2018fail fast, fail often\u2019 culture encourages a falsification approach: finding a method or technology that works means experimenting with many things that don\u2019t. Failure is recognized as a necessary experience on the way to success.<\/p>\n

But to what extent can such an approach be applied to academic settings? It\u2019s hard to accept that you might fail, or that you are likely to do so, in a culture that rewards only success. Although research is increasingly performed in teams, the overall accountability for obtaining and managing funding<\/a>, through grants for example, rests mostly with principal investigators.<\/p>\n

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What elite sport prepared me for in the lab \u2014 and what it didn\u2019t<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Perhaps we need to look beyond science for inspiration. In a Nature Careers column published on 23 April, Javier Nion Fiera, a PhD student in immunology and microbiology at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, compares his experience in science with his experience in sport<\/a> (he was a goalkeeper in Spain\u2019s under-19 men\u2019s football league). Athletes are given access to video replays and attend coaching sessions to understand what they could do better, but few mechanisms to assess failure exist in academia. \u201cThat uncertainty is what makes scientific failure feel different,\u201d he writes. \u201cWithout a clear cause, it\u2019s easy to turn the result inwards. Was it my competence that was to blame? My choice of project? The whole idea?\u201d<\/p>\n

There are lessons here for people with managerial responsibilities and for working researchers, too. Scientists can access some support through their university\u2019s internal networks and initiatives, such as Imperial\u2019s Good Science Project, which co-organized the conference. Other institutions will have similar projects. Managers of university training programmes, institutions\u2019 research-support offices and other organizations could all be doing more to help researchers to work through failure.<\/p>\n

Principal investigators can also help early-career colleagues to think beyond the idea of \u2018standing on the shoulders of giants\u2019 by acknowledging that doubt is \u201cinherent to the scientific profession\u201d, as Marie-Emilie Terret, a cell biologist at the Coll\u00e8ge de France in Paris, told Nature in a Careers feature (Nature 651, 543\u2013544; 2026<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In a world of team science, there must be a better way to learn from failure, and not to see it as a burden. We all need to be doing a lot more to make failure a normal part of the scientific process. That begins with talking about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You have full access to this article via your institution. A failed experiment shouldn\u2019t mean the end of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[525,1159,63472,1160,4853,79,7139],"class_list":{"0":"post-603086","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-careers","9":"tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","10":"tag-lab-life","11":"tag-multidisciplinary","12":"tag-publishing","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-scientific-community"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}