Before my university term starts, I have two dates towards the end of September to talk to young women. One of these is directed at girls of school age, the other women at PhD level, to try to encourage them that science and women mix perfectly well and careers in science may be satisfying and fruitful (note, I don’t just mean academic science either). Inevitably this leads me to reflect on how to portray my ‘life story’. I wrote about this challenge before, since I find it hard to strike a happy medium between talking about all the things that have gone wrong and the wish to encourage others that things are not impossible.
Reading Stuart Firestein’s recent book ‘Failure’ has given me a new way of considering this problem. Firestein is considering the important question provided in his sub-title ‘Why Science is so Successful’. In it he explores a host of knotty topics, including why the way we teach the Scientific Method is likely to put many children off science for ever and why we should have a better repository of the outcomes of unsuccessful experiments. It is a provocative though fairly light read, and it is probably even more important that it should be read by non-scientists than by those practicing scientists who implicitly should know the stuff anyhow (though may not be conscious of all of it).
So what has failure in science got to do with my life story? The chapter on ‘The arc of failure’ neatly points out what is wrong with the Whiggish, teleological so-familiar narrative of great man has a great idea, leaps out of the bath shrieking Eureka and the world is forever changed (I paraphrase the much more elegant prose Firestein actually uses). He feels that the accurate portrayal of how science progresses is not well-served by such a narrative: it is simply not the reality of how science gets done. Reality is much more about years of perseverance and a lot of dead-ends before something notable happens, which may, rarely, be transformational in the field (or at least result in a publication). Reality is about a lot of experiments which quite simply don’t work and, as he says, the reasons for failure make up much of what is interesting in science.
Life stories are similar in their trajectory. Everyone, at whatever level, will have experienced the misery of having had their most cherished idea, written into a grant proposal and submitted with cheerful anticipation of a happy outcome, end up being trashed by some risk-averse committee. No one I know, however successful, has failed to find themselves charging down a dead end from time to time, or seen a desirable target snatched away from them. And no one has always known precisely where they’re heading, with each staging post on the way mapped out and successfully and successively ticked off. The arc of life is just another version of the arc of failure Firestein describes.
I have always illustrated my career with examples of these dead ends, because I think it matters. I make it clear that I did not start off aiming for where I’ve ended up, and there were some notably bad decisions en route. Maybe I should stress this more. Additionally, most of these were my decisions, not things done to me by others out to trip up the unwary female. I do not want young women to assume that life is designed to be hard for them in science, even if unfortunately still too often that may turn out to be the case. As the recent coverage of the CV of failures made plain, many people have many setbacks and it doesn’t have to mean THE END.
But, as in my recent post on resilience, I also think it is important to recognize that one bad decision does not necessarily mean the end of one’s dreams (although of course it might), nor that if things go wrong it means that it is impossible to pick oneself up and start again – be it in the same direction or another. I suspect at 16 being told that your life is going to be an ‘arc of failure’ might not convey a palatable, let alone encouraging message, however true it may be. So, while seeing the parallels between Firestein’s description of how science is done and the reality of the scientist’s life, I suspect a little more optimism may be required for the latter. Exactly how much negativity one can allow to creep in may depend on the age of the audience: the older the audience is, I would hope the more robust, so that although cynicism may increase I would also hope so would the knowledge that if you’ve failed once it doesn’t mean you’ll always fail.
So, armed with the insight Firestein’s book has given me, I will consider again how to balance the ups and downs of my life in each of my forthcoming talks. I will consider the extent to which I can be encouraging as I dissect those mistaken decisions and the times I got snubbed, rejected and otherwise knocked back. No doubt this, like the rest of life, will give me an opportunity to learn from my mistakes.
