• Question: Have any experiments gone wrong? If so, what should you do in that case?

    Asked by anon-170057 to Ben, Lizzie, Francis, Max, Sian on 8 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by Maria2005, GabrielaRomero, Ingrid.
    • Photo: Francis Man

      Francis Man answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      Yes, it happens quite often.
      What you can do in these cases is:
      – to make sure to write down exactly what you did, so that you can go back to your notes and see if you made a mistake
      – try and figure out what might be the cause
      – change one thing in the protocol (the recipe/instructions) and try again
      – ask your colleagues for advice

      Whether experiments work or not, you need to repeat them several times, just to make sure it wasn’t a random event.

    • Photo: Lizzie Wright

      Lizzie Wright answered on 10 Mar 2018:

      Yes, experiments go wrong all the time – that’s why they are called experiments! You have to have patience, assess what happened and start again…

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