• Question: Tell me about a time you took a risk and it failed?

    Asked by anon-196637 to Sebastian, Lee, Jennifer on 8 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Lee Steinberg

      Lee Steinberg answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      I saw a new method to analyse data, I spent a long time implementing it, and even longer getting results from it. The entire process was probably about 3-6 months, working on this project.

      Turned out it was just counting the number of atoms in a molecule, just in a fancy way. But I learnt a bit more about how that method worked at least!

    • Photo: Jennifer Harris

      Jennifer Harris answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      I think this is a great question. I think in science research you take risks all the time. You have an idea and spend a lot of resource developing or researching a technique and then it doesn’t work.

    • Photo: Sebastian Cosgrove

      Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      All the time, like Jennifer said. You can come up with a hypothesis that can take months to validate, and you find at the end that it is incorrect! I have spent the last year working on a particular chemical reaction that would be really nice if it worked.. but it doesn’t. Quite annoying!

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