Science Fail Fest

Science is regularly presented to us as clean, tidy and wrapped-up-in-a-bow. Whether it’s in news articles, scientific publications or even, yes we admit it, taste of science events. But ask any individual scientist and they’ll give you a backstory of how many times their experiments failed before they got to that stage – that’s if they succeeded at all. By only sharing the latest breakthroughs and making science look easy, we create unrealistic expectations; for graduate students starting out, and a nonscientific audience who might be left wondering why there isn’t that cure for cancer just yet.

Failure is, however, a perfectly normal part of the process, and important for the advancement of scientific ideas, so in honor of the International Day for Failure (October 13th) we present to you the:

because we believe that each F.A.I.L. is just the First (or maybe the Fourteenth) Attempt In Learning. Some of our taste of science cities will be holding events during the month of October to highlight how failure has been important to science. Join us to celebrate getting it wrong.