Question: how many experiments worked and why do you think they were successful?

Carolyn Nielsen answered on 17 Nov 2015:

Hi Yazmine,

I have done hundreds of experiments so am not sure exactly how many have worked, but often at the beginning many don’t work. This can be because you are new to a technique and so have made a mistake while setting the experiment up, or maybe because you forgot to include controls to show that any effect you see is real. You get much better at these things with time so these kind of mistakes become less common.

So I think for my experiments that have worked, some of the most important reasons have been that I have understood the technique well, I was very careful setting up, and I had done pilot experiments to check everything worked first. There’s no point trying to do a huge experiment (which will be expensive) without first checking everything is working ok!