And I must say that seen from within, the scholarly pursuit of truth and knowledge looks very different from what I expected. In high school, I studied science in authoritative textbooks which were, for the most part, surveys on the current state of scientific knowledge. As I advanced into my field, some of the books attempted to explain how such knowledge is obtained. But nothing in these sanitized accounts prepares future scientists for the realities of research. In the lab, we must get used to failed experiments.
Most experiments fail numerous times before they succeed.
No one likes to fail, but in a field where personal success is measured in amounts of knowledge generated, and where competition for the same answer is fierce, every mishap is a major setback. Becoming good at dealing with failure requires efficiency in rooting out its cause. In the beginning, troubleshooting consists mostly of beating our chests and trying to figure out what sort of stupid mistakes might explain the aberrant results we're obtaining. I once spent three months trying to sequence a fragment of cloned DNA without success. My self-confidence was rapidly eroding when I found that I had been misinformed about the type of vector into which the DNA fragment had been cloned.