I’ve been in science for a third of my life, at world-class research institutes and now in the biotech industry. Over this time, I have run into 5 romanticised misrepresentations of what science is and who scientists are.

I have listed these myths below, let me know what you think!

Science is not a tidy, stepwise process that flows from hypothesis through experiments to a theory. In truth, science is often a mess. Some discoveries are set off by casual observations, with no clear hypothesis to start with. Other times, the logical link between key experiments may not be immediately obvious. And all advances stretch through a graveyard of unsung experiments, buried because they failed, were unfeasible or yielded puzzling results. 

Scientists are far from paragons of objectivity. They are, obviously, human — even the intimidating professor of biochemistry! They are not immune to cognitive biases, preconceptions, hunger for fame, sympathies and rivalries. A scientist’s opinions can be as coloured as an expressionist painting. 

Forget the rogue scientist subverting the field from an empty lab. This image was possibly true many decades ago, when science was for an elite, but is out of touch with our interconnected world. Science often takes the joint effort of dozens of minds (although only 3 get the Nobel at the end).