• Question: how do you know that your work is going to be successful?

    Asked by henry to Mariam, Leo, Gioia, Iain, Jo on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by alice1996, 07kgunn, katasaurusrex.
    • Photo: Mariam Orme

      Mariam Orme answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      You don’t! That’s what makes science so exciting, you never know how things are going to work out and what the next experiment is going to show. But it also makes it frustrating at times. Sometimes experiments just don’t work, and you have to spend ages trying to figure out what’s going wrong. And sometimes when experiments do work, they show something completely different to what you were expecting; sometimes that’s really interesting, but sometimes it means your theory is completely wrong and you have to start from scratch…

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Well, I can never know for sure, no matter how well I plan it. I just have to get on with it and if things don’t work out I’ll go back to the drawing board.

    • Photo: Gioia Cherubini

      Gioia Cherubini answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      The best way for a scientist to be recognised as successful is to have published the results of his/her research in a lot of good quality scientific journals. Sometimes this is a bit unfair, because you could be unlucky and despite having worked really hard, your project hasn’t given good results for a publication 🙁
      If you work on applied research, then also having the results of your research translated into clinic, would qualify as a success

    • Photo: Joanna Watson

      Joanna Watson answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      I don’t know before I start that my work is going to be successful. We use all the information that we can to make our studies the best they can be, but sometimes unexpected things happen. We can always learn something when studies don’t go well though.

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