• Question: have you ever felt angry in science

    Asked by Ben to Greg, Jen, Laura, Mobeen, Paul on 14 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Paul O'Mahoney

      Paul O'Mahoney answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Haha, yes quite a few times, usually when experiments don’t work properly or you can’t figure something out. I usually don’t get angry though, and it’s always important to have patience with science as often it can take a while to figure things out properly and get experiments working right.

      Edit: Jen and Laura brought up a good point about psuedo-science or misrepresenting facts to sell a product. I’d also check out Ben Goldacre’s work, he covers a lot of this kind of thing in ‘Bad Science’: http://www.badscience.net/

    • Photo: Jen Lowe

      Jen Lowe answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      I get angry about pseudo-science e.g. “our micro-vitamin-eco-hyper-smooth particles will make your skin look younger” Advertisers mislead in so many ways, including trying to sound scientific when there is no evidence.
      Always look at the number of people questioned when an advert claims “78% prefer our brand”
      I am also quite cross about the large companies that fund trials and do their own research but only publish the results they wanted. Lots of results are never shared that is a waste of hard work and can hide important information about the risks of drugs etc.

      These guys are great:
      http://www.senseaboutscience.org/
      Campaign to register all trials:
      http://www.alltrials.net/

      I also sometimes get mildly irritated about science and hospitals on screen – but I can get over that as we all know it’s fiction…

    • Photo: Laura Haworth

      Laura Haworth answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Haha yes when experiments haven’t gone right in the past or your results don’t show you what you expected but it is important to persevere and stay patient and eventually things will go right.

      Another aspect of science that angers me is the false claims we see in the media about how certain foods/drinks are going to give us cancer and new ‘cures’ when their stories have no scientific proof behind their statements.

    • Photo: Greg Melia

      Greg Melia answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      It’s very easy to get frustrated and angry when an experiment doesn’t work. I get this particularly when I’m trying to program a computer to do some part of an experiment, and I have a ‘bug’ in the code so it doesn’t work. It seems obvious to me that it should work, but it just doesn’t! I end up shouting at my screen late at night – and then become very sheepish when I eventually find the error and realise it’s something very obvious that I should never have done in the first place.

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