Science is hard. If you’ve spent a stint in a biomedical research laboratory you’ll almost certainly have learned this lesson the hard way. Perhaps you felt it first when you set up an experiment for then^th时间认为您对协议进行的调整将解决问题。您已经仔细阅读了文献，重新制作的试剂，试图在您的思维中进行严格的态度，与同事讨论，并计划了您的控件。

但是挥之不去的怀疑仍然是因为这正是您上次告诉自己的。也许实验失败或结果没有意义，因为它是基于错误的假设，或者是因为您使用错误的系统来测试您的想法？或者，也许该实验没有出于一些愚蠢的原因而起作用 - 也许是水或彩色eppendorf管上的盖子？也许在深夜的灵感中，一切都会变得清晰？也许这次会很幸运？

最终，如果您坚持不懈，聪明，灵活地思考，阅读文献并在需要帮助的地方获得帮助，那么您就会开始看到它可以稳步进步。一个实验可能开始起作用，因为您破解了一个基本问题，或者是因为您优化了多个小问题，因为您尝试了其他问题，或者没有发现原因。或控制实验可能会揭示一些完全出乎意料的东西。

Watson and Crick had plenty of false starts along the way

The lesson becomes clear. Rigor, clear thinking, and wielding a pipette with precision aren’t enough. Doing science requires tenacity. Watson and Crick had plenty of false starts along the way. To succeed, you must really want to know the answer to your question. And, like a rock-climber, you need to get satisfaction from finding a good new foothold. Not just when surveying the view from the top.

It’s a common experience. But it isn’t the impression you are likely to get as a student sitting through a research talk. When a charismatic key note speaker takes to the podium at an international meeting, the story she or he is telling is likely to be one they have told dozens of times before: one they have woven out the fabric of the successive failures and successes of a team of hardworking students and post-docs over many, many years; some of whom, through bad luck or lack of persistence, have fallen by the wayside; some of whom have made it; almost all of whom have now left the lab.

一旦数据将其置于宽屏幕上，汗水和血液就被冲走了：剩下的就是一个故事。这就是我们所说的科学。但这是电影史诗版本。没有人打扰筛选“制作”。同样，在广泛阅读期刊中简要发表的论文中，也没有将进行科学涉及的困难传达给读者。在“写得好的纸”中，一切都应该随之展开。假设被构架然后测试。

No one bothers to screen the “making of”

In fact, it’s very for a rare journal to agree to publish a novel hypothesis without, at the same time, publishing the data that put it to the test – even though, as a consequence, one can’t tell if a model predicts or explains the data. And data presented without a framing hypothesis is called ‘descriptive’ – a designation that can be used to kill the chances of its being published.

It makes some sense to present things in this way, but it’s a strange way to describe what we do. By making the communication of new facts, ideas and impact the focus of what we present to the world, we conceal the day to day realities of the process by which we uncover new things about the world in which we live.

实际上，尽管出版的困难常常是巨大的，但与发现真正新事物的困难相比，它们苍白。科学家白天和黑夜都努力奋斗是大自然，而不是出版。这就是为什么与出版我们的小胜利发现相关的延误和创伤感到如此令人沮丧的原因。

It is nature, not publication, that scientists grapple with

It’s the struggle along the way that truly is the scientific method. It is the failed experiments, ambiguous data, tears and fallen ideas, not the statistical tests, upon which our understanding of the world rests. This is why no-one can dismiss what scientists do as biased, fake or elitist. Almost anyone can do it; but it’s hard.

也许是时候庆祝这个科学家secret truth at meetings, when training the next generation of scientists, and in our discourse with the public. It is the Odyssey, not the conquest, that makes science a heroic pursuit.

And by recognising this, perhaps we can lessen the unrealistic pressure put on young researchers to quickly come up with and publish startling new hypotheses and the data to support it; freeing the determined and insatiably curious to enjoy the long, hard and meandering path through nature’s beautiful landscape in search of the way things actually work.