Chapter 1: Begley’s Bombshell- Areli Estrada

As I finished reading chapter one, I realized science is a thing that takes many trial and errors to get to and even if you find the answer, there can always be other possibilities. Anyone can make mistakes, especially when it comes to learning something new, trying things out and just understanding the material. The people we may look up to have had to go through many errors and successes to get to where they are. Same thing goes for scientists. In Bergley’s Bombshell, page 12, says ” The ecosystem in which academic scientists work has created conditions that actually set them up for failure.” Just like students, scientists have to turn in their research and work on time in order to get the full credit. As they try to meet their time goals, they can often make mistakes. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re making the mistake. 

This isn’t surprising because anyone can make mistakes but what is surprising is that when scientist are researching they often can find literature that sometimes isn’t completely 100% true. Yet they still do their research based on that information. As stated in the book, errors don’t really appear, maybe years later. A little mistake can lead to years and years of more research and that also takes money. This can slow down the progress made already, such as treatments and cures. Now, maybe the scientist are wasting our time and money. But research can always be improved and proven wrong. There’s still many things that are a mystery to us. The best we can do is to learn from the mistakes and make them better. There will continue to be mistakes but that’s what science is about. You make your experiment and test it. That’s how you can know if you got it right or can improve it. As I got more into the book, page 15 said, “Mostly these estimated failure rates are educated guesses. Only a few studies tried to measure the magnitude of this problem directly.” These concerns are not being ignored. The numbers are concerning but there are people working on it. This can either be a weakness or strength for the upcoming years. I like to think of it as the more mistakes the more knowledge we gain.