Failomics
| 1 April, 2011 | Richard P. Grant |
8
|
|
Why is science so darned difficult? It’s not simply that it takes a lot of hard work and concentrated brain power to really understand even basic scientific principles, but–for experimental scientists, at least–experiments have a tendency to fail in a way that doesn’t provide any useful information.
Yes, some experiments give negative results, and that’s not the same thing at all. A clinical trial may show no, or a negative, effect–but that is useful information. I’m talking about failure, about tubes dropped on the floor, about getting lost while you’re pipetting 24 different solutions into a 96-well plate.
To my great surprise, there’s an entire field devoted to this phenomenon: failomics. And we’re fortunate indeed to have a couple of posters discussing reasons behind such failures, such as the content of reliquum and even a screen for arrest mutants. The pioneer in this field is one Isabelle Desjeux, Molecular Institute of Technology, Singapore.
She says, “a method as scientific as the data would allow was followed in order to obtain the results described in the poster […] I do take my fun rather seriously.”
Fascinating stuff.
|
|
previous post
“….experiments have a tendency to fail in a way that doesn’t provide any useful information.” I disagree. Science is about discovery. Any experiment, failed or otherwise, offers some degree of useful information. We only have to be receptive. And integrate that into the discovery and learning process.Otherwise, we would repeat failed experiments over and over again.
If you drop your samples on the floor, what do you discover?
it depends on the experiment, dear Richard. You might discover an unexpected reaction, for instance. A student of mine forgot newly released jellyfish in the little tanks where we usually keep them. The little environment of the tanks soon degraded, with increased salinity and lack of food. When he remembered to look at the little jars, there were tiny hydroids on the bottom, instead of dead jellyfishs. The jellyfish transdifferentiated their cells and went back to the polyp stage. We then repeated the experiment, placing the little jellies under sublethal conditions, and the ontogeny reversal from jellyfish to polyp happened again and again. The immortal jellyfish had been discovered! For those of you who are not familiar with this stuff, transdifferentiation means that a differentiated cell can de-differentiate and then differentiate into another cell type. The polyp stage is a larval stage, like the caterpillar is the larva of the butterfly, and the jellyfish is the adult, just like the sexually reproductive butterfly. These little jellies, instead of ending their life in distress, just go back to a polyp stage, re-organizing their cells into a polyp condition (i.e. as if a butterfly, instead of dying, becomes a caterpillar). And then can produce jellyfish again.
This has been discovered due to something similar to dropping samples on the floor, sort of!
“it depends on the experiment”– of course it does.
But the point is that often things often go *wrong* in frustrating and non-useful ways, (not the same as a negative result), which more often than not just causes pain and distress. Not every mould is penicillin, not every forgetful student makes such an amazing discovery.
Fully agree with you, Richard. But then, most of the work we do is dully repetitive, most results are confirmatory, and it is rare that a breakthrough is made with a carefully planned experiment. Innovation cannot be predicted, by definition. The scientific enterprise of the century (the genome project) was a matter of careful repetition of a standardized protocol! Eventually, it was done by a machine!
I spent almost a year of my life (split in several periods) in Papua New Guinea, with the world expert of jellyfish (Jean Bouillon), in a little island in the middle of nowhere. No experiments. Diving in the corals, to collect animals every day, and then rearing them to elucidate the life cycles (the polyp and jellyfish story of above). We found new species, new genera, new families, new types of life cycles, new types of symbiotic relationships. From these things, then, there is enough to chew with planned experiments. But the fun is to go out there and look around, instead of shaking vials and pressing the buttons of very costly equipment. And then, while on the island, we had time to discuss, to think, to explore strange ideas (there is not much to do, in the evening, in an island that is 500 m long and 100 m wide).
The secret of successful studies is: choose a topic that will give you good results, if you just work hard and you are diligent. But this is not enough. Choose a topic that, if you are lucky, will give you something fantastic! The more a thing has been explored, the less you have chances to find “strange” things, maybe. But if there are lots of people working at your topic, maybe there will be greater chances to be cited and to have a bulging H-index in your curriculum. Just because you publish careful and diligent papers that put another brick in a well established building. Of course these papers will be forgotten very soon, but this is not so important, nobody considers the Cited Half Life of journals, just the Impact Factor is important.
And then, in my business (marine biology), people LOVE to do what they do. Not all science is sitting in a lab with a carefully planned routine to follow. Some science is great fun, just for the sake of doing it, no matter what the results are. These people, however, are becoming rarer and rarer. Serious science cannot be fun, it has to be sacrifice. And frustration if you do not have the results you expected.
I tell you a story, Richard. I once received a message asking for a letter of support of a famous Marine Lab (where I worked for a while in the past). The main campus wanted to close it and they needed scientists to state that it was a mistake. I checked the web page of the lab, to see what they were doing after all these years. And found that the most prominent research field was based on experiments with Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster. In a marine lab! My letter of support was: close that lab, it is a waste of facilities to have a marine lab and then work in the same way you might work in the main campus! This is happening in many marine stations all over the world. Field biologists have too much fun, and probably they are not as competitive as frustrated, hip laboratory rats in deciding scientific policies. This frustration is compensated by the expensive equipment syndrome, and also by the overstatement of own results, with lots of mutual support in reciprocal citation or, also, in publishing papers with 100 names so that if each of the authors cites that paper in another one, the 100 citations are reached in a flash! Frustrated scientists can become dangerous, and eat up happy scientists. Ugh!
May I point out respectfully that the purpose of the this new field of Failomics is not only to study these failures but to figure out how to use them. Following the comment of Nobel Prize winner Paul Lauterbur, “The history of the last 50 years of science can be written in terms of papers rejected from Nature and Science”, the field aims (ambitiously) to predict the next 50 years of science on the basis of current rejections and by extension any failure happening in the lab.
I wish you a pleasant week.
Not being able to do what one loves is a good reason not to remain in science, in my humble opinion. So I’m very happy for you, Nando 🙂
“experiments with Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster. In a marine lab! ”
Yeah. Dangerous: because C elegans and the fly are such well-studied model organisms, they probably had to work with them to get grant money. And yet…
In another lifetime I was an engineer. I always remember our planned experiments in the lab usually failing due to dodgy equipment, contaminated test tubes, lack of scientific technique – you know, just general non-professionalism.
As I see it, the whole field of science is making educated guesses which you hope lead to discoveries. Not everyone is an Einstein, and we cant all make those giant leaps. Many scientists are plodders or grunts, but the world needs those too.
I think another good take away from this article is that science has been so driven by commercialism, everyone from uni'[s to sponsors expecting results, to make a profit, that many times pure science, the pursuit of discovery seems to come second place. I think something like Failomics even if this is just light hearted, might help act as a pressure valve to financial pressures to achieve financial results.