On being a scientist

Imagine a career where a high success rate means you fail more than 50% of the time and you can never prove you are correct.  That is being a scientist. 

I live in a world where the majority of my friends are also scientists and I often forget that most people have relatively limited formal exposure to science.  Sure, you take biology and chemistry in high school and if you’re not a science major in college, you take a few science classes.  What gets lost in this level of education is how messy the scientific process is and how often you fail to accomplish your objective.  What also gets lost is how the excitement of unexpected results is really what drives most of us.  We teach science as a linear process in introductory science classes – researcher develops hypothesis, designs experiment to test hypothesis, experiment supports hypothesis, new knowledge acquired and added to text book.  But, that isn’t how it really works.

A more accurate representation of this bland description is that – researcher develops hypothesis, designs experiment to test hypothesis, experiment fails for any number of reasons, researcher develops new experiment to test hypothesis, experiment inconclusive, new knowledge acquired, researcher reevaluates hypothesis and starts over.  Of course, that doesn’t do the process justice.  In my experience as a forest ecologist it usually goes something like this:

1. Working out in the field with colleagues, one of us notices something happening.
2. As we work collecting data, we talk about that something.  We tear it apart.  We put it back together.  We try and fit it within the construct of how we think things work. 
3. The idea starts to take shape and we develop a research question or four.
4. We develop hypotheses for these questions.
5. We wait for an opportunity to submit a grant proposal and the funding opportunities usually have a success rate lower than 10%.  We may have to submit a proposal several times before it is funded and in some cases it may never be funded.
6. One day, the program officer calls and tells us congratulations, your proposal has been selected for funding.
7. After a celebration and congratulatory high-fives, it sinks in that now we have to face the logistic challenges of putting in the experiment in the field. 
8. My rule of thumb is that 50% of what we plan in the office won’t work in the field.  But, we figure it out because we’re a persistent bunch.  Persistence is something you learn along the way when you fail the majority of the time. 
9. Fast forward several years and numerous challenges and we’ve finally got data we can begin to analyze. 
10. We analyze the data to test our hypotheses.  We find support for some and no support for others. 
11. The really exciting part is trying to figure out why the results ended up as they did.  Circling back to step 2, we question the construct of how we thought things worked.  Science is most exciting when your results cause you to fundamentally change the way you think a system works. 
12. Now, we start the whole process over again because while we answered some questions, we ended up with a whole bunch more.

​If you’re not a scientist (which I hope) and reading this (the whole reason I write this blog), you’re probably thinking – This poor science geek can only make friends with other scientists. and It must be pretty demoralizing to fail most of the time.  I certainly can’t speak for everyone in science, but I’m pretty obsessive when it comes to thinking about forests and most of my friends are pretty obsessive about thinking about their study systems too.  It’s not a curse; nature is a fascinatingly complex puzzle.  I absolutely love forests and I strive to do meaningful work that helps us understand and better manage our forests.  As for the failure part, sure sometimes it’s disheartening.  But the unexpected is what motivates me.  When I get unexpected results and it challenges me to think about the forest in a new way, that is what wakes me up in the middle of the night.  That is what allows me to let the grant proposal and paper rejections roll off my back.  When I teach introductory ecology, I try and communicate to students that this process is not linear like their textbook would have them believe.  The information that makes it into a book has lots of failure and reevaluation behind it.  The individuals that discovered those things in their textbook were driven by curiosity and the desire to more completely understand whatever system they were working in.  While this career certainly doesn’t appeal to most, I just hope that people who aren’t scientists can appreciate the process the way I appreciate the process an artist or business person or engineer goes through.