Science & Medicine Failure
Organizations need to improve their willingness to accept and learn from failure, even when the stakes are high. Yes, that even applies to researchers and medicine. Failure is essential to science. Experimentation and exploration are the core elements of research. These fundamentals are taught to our children in their first school science lessons.
It is paradoxical that, while failed studies are just as important for the advancement of knowledge as successful studies, scientific articles always present positive results. This positive-results bias is a massive issue within the scientific community (some fields are worse than others). Researchers are more likely to submit and editors are more likely to accept positive results than negative or inconclusive results. For knowledge to grow, we need to be able to read about experiments and studies gone wrong, medical treatments that do not work, statistically insignificant results and all the other interesting research that do not get published.
In collaboration with Journal of Trial and Error, and their science writer Marcel Hobma, we developed a new exhibition theme focused on failure in science.
