Everyone has to turn failed experiments into a successful PhD because they have to finish and graduate by the time funding runs out.
It's also extra untrue because this author is describing running into a null result and turning that into a PHD when usually null results don't go anywhere, either to a thesis or a publication.
But it becomes true again in the context that the null result is nice framing for this article but isn't the framing in the intro/contents of the thesis. And also because:
"A turning point came when another graduate student suggested a dramatic change to my protocol. I was skeptical, but I thought it was worth a shot. It turned out they were correct: After trying yet another experiment, the results started to look better—and after a few more changes, I eventually got the protocol to work. "
doesn't sound like a failed experiment to me!
Especially that "life might be more complex in infectious disease research than in oncology" - as an outsider this really caught my interest, I'd have imagined the two have similar levels of grants? Maybe more than a field like Psychology or Developmental Biology, about the same?
Does this mean more people are going into in disease research because A) it's more interesting to them? (vs Oncology)... or B) The grants from COVID mean it's a better field?
You can see NCI (National Cancer Institute) leading the pack there, with NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) coming in second.
It surprises me how few people, even in my field(s) (which are overwhelmingly funded primarily by NIH), know of or use these tools. Particularly RePORTER and the advanced project search functions.
Oncology has way way way more funding because there's a much bigger market for it - infectious diseases primarily affect poor people who aren't Americans so not much money in it. Even at the peak of covid I remember advisors warning phd applicants passionate about infectious diseases that the funding surge wasn't going to last and to be careful (which was right). Consider how moderna was originally founded as a vaccine company before almost completely shifting focus to oncology because that's where the money was. Obviously they swung back to vaccines when the pandemic showed up but now they're back focused on oncology.
Funding priorities are also set by the government - there's the cancer moonshot etc which means tons and tons of cancer funding. For universities new cancer treatments are quite valuable IP. And so on. Within a field it becomes very obvious where the funding and momentum is - what are the buzzwords everyone is putting in their grants and papers (nanotech? AI?), what types of publications are getting published int he big journals. Gene therapy came out of its winter after luxturna for example. Car-t was booming after the first approval there, entire departments were set up for it. Mrna stuff is super hot right now, but one of the researchers behind the core technology (that made her university like a billion dollars in royalties) was denied tenure and pushed out of academia when she originally developed the technology because it was considered not useful. First lab I worked in - the PI was fresh out of his postdoc and got hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding and his own lab and bought his own flow cytometer and everything (absolutely not the normal path lol) because he was a first author on a particularly good CRISPR paper. On one hand - trend chasing and bubbles have their obvious downsides. On the other hand - it does mean a lot of resources get funneled into new interesting areas when something cool pops up. But on the original hand - trend chasing and bubbles, welcome to humans on earth i guess. But yeah in terms of how you know about it - you'll know it's quite obvious who's getting money and tenure.
Infectious disease in particular is going to have a really hard time. No market for it, no industry demand. Investments there are already winding down in general: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/johnson-and-johnson-sh....
Making a regular experience sound like a special sort of skill only you have is itself a special sort of skill that it's valuable to have if you want to apply for grants.
I'm afraid that I don't have the faintest idea, both because my grant activity hasn't been noticably effective (and I held no grants while pursuing my Ph.D.), and because I've never applied for a Startup / Innovation grant.
“If an experiment doesn’t go as expected, it doesn’t necessarily mean you did something wrong.”
That’s why it's called an experiment… I don’t get why this is insightful.
I guess there is a lesson about carefully noting down failures, in the corporate world handing over a document detailing all the things you tried that failed is much better than just failing silently.
The outcome of the research (experiment) could be both success and failure, right? That's why we study it, experiment with it, we do not know it yet, we want to see if it is as believed or not. The important is to grow the body of knowledge here - and knowing if something does not work the way we thought will is knowledge -, not to pretend being successful, right? For pretending there are countless other (much much better paying) occupations anyway.
So unsuccesful results are very difficult to publish and to be the base of a thesis. So you must find a twist or secondary result and make it the central part. (Does listening to Macarena for 8 hours per day cause brain damage in mice?)
Also, I think I seen that Macarena article. : ) It suggested to extend the research to primates and Spice Girls and finding songs that cure the damage of Macarena.