Editor’s note: This is an opinion piece and does not represent the opinion of Beaver’s Digest. This op-ed reflects the personal opinions of the writer. 

On a wet, gray, typically English day, a group of physical chemists gathered in Nottingham waited for the next presentation. 

Headlines on the newspapers that morning shouted to the world that Americans had begun to bomb North Vietnam. The Cold War seemed the only thing on the horizon, and the British and American chemists shifted uncomfortably as Boris Derjaguin, a Soviet chemist, hurried onstage.

Derjaguin had been in the process of his research for five years now, though it had amounted to very little excitement outside of his lab in Moscow. That day, however, whispers began to crop up in the audience, heads turned to each other and eyebrows raised.

The Soviet declared that his experiments, which amounted to forcing water through extremely narrow tubes, resulted in the water growing heavier, taking on the viscosity of molasses. Further experimentation with sophisticated instruments reported the water had turned from liquid to polymer.

After hearing this and returning home, American and British scientists immediately began attempting to recreate Derjaguin’s experiments. Some were successful, some failed — none could supply consistent or compelling reasons for either outcome.

This began to ruffle feathers at the Pentagon, who funded a group of scientists to, once and for all, outpace the Soviets in the study of ‘polywater.’ 

“Good news,” said Drew Fetherston, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. “The U.S. has apparently closed the polywater gap, and the Pentagon is bankrolling efforts to push this country’s polywater technology ahead of the Soviet Union’s.”

Two years later, Denis Rousseau, a chemist at Bell Telephone Laboratories, was playing a game of handball in the hot California sun. As the sweat coagulated on his brow, he collected it and brought it to the lab. The result of a few experiments confirmed what he had suspected: Its makeup was identical to that of polywater. Sodium lactate, one of the main biological components of sweat, was to blame for polywater.

How embarrassing. 

The dirty samples that Derjaguin used won him much infamy. However, it stacked up to a blip beside the rest of his career. Derjaguin laid the foundation of the modern science of colloids and surfaces — which sounds like a lot of jargon but amounts to some of the most important principles in biochemistry, chemical engineering, industrial sciences and medical instruments. 

He even has an approximation named after him, which is no small honor.

Suffice to say, even the smartest, most well-regarded skeptics of the scientific community are only human. They sweat and make mistakes.

This isn’t any big revelation though. In the last teaching lab of my undergraduate degree, I feel like every time I walk out at the end of each class period, I hear someone sigh and mumble to a commiserating peer about some awesome fumble they made. Most of the time, it’s me. 

I don’t think this is a great reveal to non-researchers either. Whether you have a high-school understanding of the scientific method or a collegiate one, you know that failure also cranks the wheel of progress forward.

It might be something we’ve begun to take for granted though.

“The percentage of U.S. adults expressing a great deal of confidence in scientists in general rose to 39% in April 2020 and remained at 39% in November 2020 before declining to 28% by September 2022,” the United States National Science Foundation stated in their Feb. 14th report.

That was three years ago, but most other data from the last two years seems to commiserate with this trend. 

It’s impossible to divine why, generally, Americans are losing confidence in scientists. The pandemic likely had something to do with it, but a rising disappointment in institutions might also have blame in the game.

Between funding cuts, a rise in debunked alternative medicine theories, and this low confidence, it almost feels as though science has got to be on its best behavior. Someone needs to find the cure for cancer or put a man on Mars soon.

Luckily, that’s not the way science works.

It’s slow, tedious and gets caught up in the details. Even when a researcher is as careful and fastidious as possible, they might still get dirty samples and end up costing the Pentagon millions of dollars. 

No one wants to waste thousands of taxpayer dollars pursuing a line of research that comes up empty. And it doesn’t seem right to throw valuable grant money at too-niche studies. 

But is it really a waste? 

High risk, high reward isn’t just true on Wall Street, it can be true in the laboratory as well. In the early 1900s, the emerging field of quantum mechanics was as out-of-the box as science had ever been. Even Albert Einstein famously disagreed with its core assertions — they were just too strange.

However, the study of quantum mechanics brought us into the digital age and continues to propel us past impossible feats of technology. And it took a lot of wrong ideas to get there.

The problem science must contend with now is that out-of-the-box ideas are difficult to get funded. Really, even fairly in-the-box ideas are hard to get funded. 

It typically takes anywhere from 8–20 months for grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and the average age at which scientists receive their first traditional NIH grant is 43. In order to get these grants, researchers are expected to have already done preliminary research and reported promising results.

This all seems counterproductive to a method that relies on curiosity and exploration, not necessarily pure results.

In 2018, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a report concluding that, despite the NIH’s goals to fund innovative, novel scientific ideas, they had only grown more conservative over the years.

They found that the “novel” work that received funding was usually building on top of past novel research, and not starting from ground zero. In clinical research, most research was built on already well-established ideas.

“NIH’s propensity to fund projects that build on the most recent advances has declined over the last several decades,” the National Bureau of Economic Research’s report stated.

If we are willing to agree that “high risk, high reward” applies in the laboratory just as much as it applies to Wall Street, we’ve also got to be willing to accept it when those risks don’t reward us with lunar landers, but simply with the knowledge that one way didn’t work.

That doesn’t mean that we should release the throttle and give money to every research initiative. It means that the NIH and institutes just need to look at the returns of their research investments in the long-run. 

One of the most spectacular aspects of the scientific method is its self-correcting nature. To err is human, and science has a beautiful way of eventually catching those errors and righting them. 

Scientists are human, too. They put their pants on one leg at a time and they sweat — and sometimes that sweat messes up an experiment.