Science is Messy

The question of the morning is “What is Science?”

Don Kennedy, editor of the journal Science, says “It’s a process.”

“It’s a dirty process,” clarifies Alexandra Witze, news editor at Nature, “Science is quite messy.”

As a graduate student in Neuroscience, pretending for the next few days to be a journalist, I can tell you firsthand that Witze is right.  Performing a scientific experiment often seems akin to making a soufflé without a recipe. It usually doesn’t work.  You make a hypothesis, you figure out how you might test it, and you try it.  It doesn’t work.  Not the first time, not the second time, not the third time.  You re-assess your experiment. You try it again, and again… and again. Perhaps, if you are lucky, you get a result. Perhaps it supports your hypothesis. Perhaps not. 

Someday, after several years of work, you might have enough data to publish a paper on a tiny piece of a puzzle, a small question within the world of science, which might elucidate something that has some small relation to some bigger question.  As a scientist, this is how I see science.

In journalism, it’s what’s new that matters.  An article that was published in Nature yesterday is something that scientists “just discovered.” In fact, those scientists were probably working on that discovery for years, and have known for months the conclusion that today is “news.”

Yet even when scientists have amassed enough evidence to support their hypothesis and publish in a major journal like Science or Nature, their findings still may be proven wrong. 

As Kennedy said, “Anything published in Science is ready for reversal.”

Or, as Witze put it, “You can publish in Nature or Science and it can be total crap.”

This idea of “science as process” creates a dilemma for those who need to report “science news.” They must share new findings with the general public.  They must understand the process behind it.  They must help convey the process in their writing, to fit a new finding into the context of the history of the field.  And, they must accomplish all this in 400 words.