"For each of us who appear to have had a successful experiment there are many to whom their own experiments seem barren and negative"
About this Quote
Melvin Calvin points to the asymmetry between what is seen and what is lived in scientific work. A handful of experiments get remembered as breakthroughs while a multitude of efforts end in results that feel empty, inconclusive, or flatly contradictory. The phrasing matters: he says some of us appear to have had success, acknowledging how public recognition edits out the false starts; and he notes that others see their experiments as barren and negative, emphasizing the demoralizing experience of null or adverse findings.
Barren and negative evokes two linked realities. Many experiments yield no fruit because nature does not cooperate with our hypotheses. Others produce negative results that are scientifically meaningful but socially undervalued. Culture and incentives often privilege positive, headline-ready outcomes, so the literature skews toward shiny successes. The consequence is survivorship bias: the celebrated path looks smooth only because discarded trails are invisible. Calvin reframes that invisibility as a collective cost. Without the failed attempts, the one success would be impossible to recognize or interpret.
His own career illustrates the point. At Berkeley, using carbon-14 tracers to map the steps of photosynthesis required relentless iterations in chromatography and timing, with many plates and runs that did not line up. The Calvin-Benson-Bassham pathway emerged not as a single triumph but from an accumulation of partial attempts, missteps, and adjustments. By foregrounding appearance and seeming, he suggests that what feels like failure may be knowledge in disguise: a boundary marked, a hypothesis narrowed, a technique refined.
There is also an ethical undertone. Credit in science tends to concentrate, the Matthew effect turning a few names into symbols while others fade. Calvin’s reminder is a call for humility and solidarity. Real progress depends on recording, sharing, and valuing the negative and the barren, because they map the terrain that makes the rare oasis visible and repeatable.
Barren and negative evokes two linked realities. Many experiments yield no fruit because nature does not cooperate with our hypotheses. Others produce negative results that are scientifically meaningful but socially undervalued. Culture and incentives often privilege positive, headline-ready outcomes, so the literature skews toward shiny successes. The consequence is survivorship bias: the celebrated path looks smooth only because discarded trails are invisible. Calvin reframes that invisibility as a collective cost. Without the failed attempts, the one success would be impossible to recognize or interpret.
His own career illustrates the point. At Berkeley, using carbon-14 tracers to map the steps of photosynthesis required relentless iterations in chromatography and timing, with many plates and runs that did not line up. The Calvin-Benson-Bassham pathway emerged not as a single triumph but from an accumulation of partial attempts, missteps, and adjustments. By foregrounding appearance and seeming, he suggests that what feels like failure may be knowledge in disguise: a boundary marked, a hypothesis narrowed, a technique refined.
There is also an ethical undertone. Credit in science tends to concentrate, the Matthew effect turning a few names into symbols while others fade. Calvin’s reminder is a call for humility and solidarity. Real progress depends on recording, sharing, and valuing the negative and the barren, because they map the terrain that makes the rare oasis visible and repeatable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Failure |
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