Alena Vdovchenko 00:04

So I’m a chemist and experimental scientist, so I don’t need to search very hard for examples of day-to-day failure.

Stephen Webster 00:12

That’s Dr Alena Vdovchenko, a postdoctoral scientist at Imperial College London, talking in April this year at the Failure in Science conference.

Alena Vdovchenko 00:22

In the lab, simply most of the things don’t work the way you plan them.

So sometimes you carefully design the experiment. You run it for sometimes weeks, months. It depends.

Maybe days if you’re lucky.

But then when you analyze the results, you realize that okay, you didn’t account for factor A.

So then you have to go back.

You need to redesign the experiment, maybe read more literature, go back to the lab.

Stephen Webster 00:48

Alena was speaking at the session called A Taxonomy of Failure, where we heard early career researchers explaining how, in real life, (let’s put it like this), things often don’t go quite as planned.

Alena Vdovchenko 01:01

But overall, I think a…