YSM Issue 96.4

Profile
SHORT
STUART FIRESTEIN
FASCINATION WITH FAILURE
Stuart Firestein, the former chair of Columbia
University’s Department of Biological
Sciences, is a neuroscientist who studies
the olfactory system, but he’s also an expert
in something else—failure. In 2015, Firestein
released a book, titled Failure: Why Science Is
So Successful, that places failure at the heart
of the scientific process.
Firestein’s journey toward the topic of failure
began while he was teaching a large cellular
and molecular neurobiology lecture course
at Columbia. For many years, his students
were expected to read an excessively long
textbook, titled Principles of Neuroscience.
“It’s a book about the brain that weighs twice
as much as the brain,” Firestein said.
Firestein noticed a critical gap between
what students were learning in the classroom
and what the researchers were doing in the
lab. “[Students] must have thought that the
process of science is to get a lot of facts, put
them in these books, and force [students] to
memorize them and spit them back up on an
exam, which is a very unpleasant experience,”
he said. “And that’s not true either. [Scientists] don’t accumulate
facts —we accumulate questions.”
The experience led him to create a new course called “Ignorance,”
which consisted of a variety of science faculty members meeting
with students once a week for two hours to talk about everything
they don’t know. “What’s their question?” Firestein asked. “Why
did they settle on that as the important question? What are the
other questions they’re ignoring while looking at this one? What
are the questions this question will lead to?”
The course became very popular as students began to
understand scientific research not as a quest for facts, but rather
as an investigation of ignorance. This course not only inspired
Firestein’s first book, Ignorance: How It Drives Science, but also
served as a jumping-off place for his contemplation of the role
of failure in science.
According to Firestein, failure is the best way to identify
the questions that lay at the root of our scientific ignorance.
“Let’s say you do an experiment, and it fails,” Firestein said.
“There must be something you didn’t know when you set this
up. We have to do some experiments before this experiment to
figure out what it is we’re missing.” In Firestein’s view, failure
IMAGE COURTESY OF STUART FIRESTEIN
BY KAVYA GUPTA
is an essential part of the scientific
process that reveals our ignorance
in actionable ways. Failure points
the finger at what we don’t know,
which allows us to then turn around
and ask more meaningful questions
about science. “It’s a way of gaining
knowledge in the same way as a
successful experiment. It is no less
valuable, no less important, and no
less a part of the process,” Firestein
said. “So, things should fail. In fact,
I think they should fail at a fairly
high rate.”
Despite its importance to scientific
discovery, many students still struggle
greatly with embracing failure. “We
tend not to accept failure easily,”
Firestein said. “We tend to see it as a
negative.” He looks at natural failures
in our environment to justify why we
should be more open to failing.
“If you look at the top predators, like
lions and tigers, I think most of us think
that they can just go out anytime they get a little hungry and
bag a snack somewhere,” Firestein said. “But that’s not actually
true. When you look at the predator-prey literature, you find
these big critters are successful fewer than twenty-five percent
of the time they go after something. Seventy-five percent of
the time, the critter escapes.” Even the top of the top encounter
failures, yet they learn from them and continue to try, whether
by changing their methods or trying a new approach.
Similarly, Firestein argues that accepting the natural likelihood
of failures is especially important. “It is a regular part of the
process,” he said. “It’s not like success and failure are two sides
of a coin, but rather like two horses pulling a wagon in the same
direction in their own particular way.”
This is sometimes hard to understand, especially for young
scientists who have struggled with accepting their failures in the
past, but it’s a key part of finding the most fascinating scientific
questions. “The truth, the correct answer, is narrow,” Firestein
said. “It’s just narrow, and it doesn’t go anywhere. Whereas
there are endless ways to screw up, and many of them are quite
interesting. They take you down new pathways. Quite often, the
screw-ups are really where the data comes out.” ■
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December 2023 Yale Scientific Magazine 11