Part 6: The Value of Failure
“I love failure.”
It is not something we usually expect to hear from a Nobel Laureate. Yet that is exactly how Sir Richard Roberts, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993, describes it. For someone who has spent a lifetime making discoveries, failure is not simply something that happens along the way. It can be one of the most useful things that happens.
We often learn to think about failure very differently. At school, getting something wrong can feel like a setback. We get the answer wrong, receive a lower mark or struggle with something while others seem to understand it. We are often encouraged to correct the mistake and move on. But what if the mistake is actually giving us information? What if it is showing us something we had not noticed before?
Omar Yaghi, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2025, experienced this during his PhD. He spent almost a year trying to make a particular compound. When he finally thought he had succeeded, the material he produced was not what he expected at all. Instead of the orange material he was looking for, he ended up with a strange brown substance. Yaghi initially saw it as a failure. His professor saw something else. He suggested that Yaghi might have made a whole new group of compounds. What looked like a mistake turned into a new direction.
Martin Chalfie, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008, has an even more personal story. As an undergraduate, he spent an entire summer working in a laboratory where nothing seemed to work. Not one experiment succeeded. He became so discouraged that he decided perhaps science was not for him and stepped away from research. It was only after having a much more positive experience in another laboratory that his confidence returned and he decided to continue. That difficult summer could easily have become the end of his scientific career. Instead, it became part of the story of how he found his way back.
Stories like these appear again and again in science. Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka has said that failure was telling him something important. Barry Marshall has spoken about the value of unexpected results, while Brian Kobilka has emphasised that when one approach does not work, there is always something else to try.
Craig Mello, who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has also spoken about the uncertainty and setbacks that are part of scientific discovery. These scientists did not succeed because everything went according to plan. They succeeded partly because they learned how to respond when it didn't.
That distinction matters. Failure is not necessarily about trying the same thing again and again. Sometimes it tells us to change direction. Sometimes it makes us ask a better question. Sometimes it forces us to look more carefully at something we had overlooked. And sometimes it simply teaches us that we need to learn more before we try again.
Perhaps this is where education has something important to learn from science. A student who gets an answer wrong is not necessarily a student who has failed to learn. The wrong answer can reveal how they are thinking. Instead of immediately correcting it, we could ask: Why did you think that? What made you choose that answer? What can we learn from it? Trying something new, discovering that it doesn't work and then thinking about what happened is part of how we develop.
Of course, failure can be frustrating. It can be disappointing, and sometimes it can be costly. We should not pretend that every failure automatically leads to something valuable. The value comes from what we do with it. Do we stop? Do we blame ourselves? Or do we become curious about what happened and what we might do differently next time?
The people we remember for their discoveries and achievements have often experienced far more setbacks than we ever see. We tend to remember the breakthrough, not the uncertainty that came before it. But perhaps that is why Richard Roberts' words are worth remembering: “I love failure.”
Maybe failure deserves a different place in our thinking. Not as something to celebrate for its own sake, but as something we can learn from. Because sometimes the most useful thing failure gives us is not an answer. It gives us a better question.
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