Successful moments in scientific research are famously rare, and people deal with them in various personal ways. Many treat a promising experimental with suspicion bordering on paranoia, refusing to believe what is right before their eyes because an experiment couldn\u2019t possibly have brought good tidings, could it have? Like a young swain disappointed in love one too many times, they harden their hearts against any glimmer of hope or joy.<\/p>\n
But when something convincingly good happens to me in the lab, I\u2019m the first one to jump up onto the lab bench and do a victory dance. There are far too many failures in my line of work not to celebrate a success, no matter how short-lived or misguided it may turn out to be. For me, the expression \u201cdon\u2019t get your hopes up\u201d is an imperative that goes against human nature. Will I really be less disappointed if something turns out not to be true if I don\u2019t celebrate at the beginning? <\/p>\n
No, actually, it will suck either way, so I reckon I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.<\/p>\n
Recently, I ended up with a nice result on a minor problem I\u2019ve been chipping away at for a few months now \u2013 the icing on the cake. Because I am a particularly sceptical scientist<\/a>, I\u2019d devised several ways of looking at the same question, had reproduced the experiments a number of times using different conditions and a large number of controls, and had also performed a few experiments to rule out the key formal possibilities. Everything looked as solid as anything ever can in this business. Feeling that irrepressible urge to share the love, I opened up Twitter and told the world that I\u2019ve proved my hypothesis. <\/p>\n In amongst the shower of congratulatory and humorous quips that came back was one sour lemon: I can\u2019t remember who sent it or what the exact wording was, but in essence the tweet chided me for saying I\u2019d proved my hypothesis instead of that I\u2019d disproved my null hypothesis. <\/p>\n Around the same time, I\u2019d had a spectacular failure: a carefully nurtured multiwell plate of cells packed full of interesting questions flew off the microscope onto the floor and was ruined. When I tweeted that I\u2019d had to bin an experiment because it hadn\u2019t worked, someone tweeted (again, I can\u2019t recall who or exactly how it was phrased) that there was no such thing as a failed experiment \u2013 all experiments should be designed to give an answer either no matter what the outcome and it was wrong of me to have claimed it had failed. When I explained that the cells had ended up on the floor, this person replied that I had still learned something: as near as I could understand, his stance was that I\u2019d falsified the hypothesis that I could perform an experiment to completion without screwing it up.<\/p>\n Right. Now, I think that Karl Popper had some really interesting and important ideas, but \u2013 like Thomas Kuhn and others \u2013 I don\u2019t believe that there is one single \u201cscientific method\u201d. And in particular, I don\u2019t think that the vast majority of scientists use falsificationist methodologies in their everyday work, aside from its ghostly remnants in the way we calculate p values for statistical purposes. When was the last time, for example, that you saw the concluding line of an abstract stating, \u201cHere, we disprove the notion that protein X is not involved in pathway Y\u201d? What fascinates me is that I still encounter people who seem to think that science should be done, or conceptualized, this way. It might be a byproduct of education: after all, I clearly recall being taught Popperian methodology in high school biology, and for all I know it\u2019s still being aired in classrooms. <\/p>\n I\u2019d be interested to hear what others think about why this Popperian view remains so compelling to some scientists. Is it a talisman against the growing suspicion that our research methodology is hopelessly messy and subjective, and that we can never really discover the truth? Does it cast some illusion of control, some spell that might separate our personalities from our science? Would it, if rigorously applied, serve to stem our inappropriate hopes and desires for a favored hypothesis to be true?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Successful moments in scientific research are famously rare, and people deal with them in various personal ways. Many treat a promising experimental with suspicion bordering on paranoia, refusing to believe what is right before their eyes because an experiment couldn\u2019t … Continue reading