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How to make failure your friend and teacher in science
Dom Byrne is a freelance radio and podcast producer based in Brighton, UK.
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Roger Kneebone’s 2020 book Expert compares molecular scientists to Savile Row tailors, lacemakers to vascular surgeons. Kneebone, a former trauma surgeon who how leads a Masters programme in surgical education at Imperial College London, says the road to professional expertise begins with an “apprentice” phase, doing monotonous tasks repeatedly and learning from mistakes.
Ruth Morgan, a crime and forensic science researcher at University College London, says: “Whether you’re learning to do a titration in the lab, or whether you’re learning to cut material as a tailor, there are so many mistakes that you make in that process. And that’s kind of the point. Every time you make a mistake you get better, and there’s a huge amount of time spent doing that.”
Earlier this year, Morgan joined Kneebone at a conference session on failure and expertise, part of a one-day failure in science conference, held at Imperial College London in partnership with Nature.
In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series that revisits some of the conference themes, Morgan says successful collaborations across scientific disciplines rely on individual researchers seeing themselves as “outsiders, beginners,” unafraid of asking questions. “That’s incredibly scary” she says, “because it means you have to concede that you don’t know something, and you’re having to ask.
“It’s quite a distinctive skillset to cultivate. You have to be willing to be uncomfortable, to really drill into what you know, but what you don’t know, and to become a really good listener, so that you can hear what somebody else in a different space sees or knows."
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We talked about the taxonomy of failure and how that can look throughout the life cycle of expertise, as a necessary companion, and a teacher, that is on the journey with us as we go from being essentially an apprentice through to becoming more expert.