Roger Kneebone’s 2020 book Expert compares molecular scientists to Savile Row tailors, lacemakers to vascular surgeons. Kneebone, a former trauma surgeon who how leads a Masters programme in surgical education at Imperial College London, says the road to professional expertise begins with an “apprentice” phase, doing monotonous tasks repeatedly and learning from mistakes.
Ruth Morgan, a crime and forensic science researcher at University College London, says: “Whether you’re learning to do a titration in the lab, or whether you’re learning to cut material as a tailor, there are so many mistakes that you make in that process. And that’s kind of the point. Every time you make a mistake you get better, and there’s a huge amount of time spent doing that.”
Earlier this year, Morgan joined Kneebone at a conference session on failure and expertise, part of a one-day failure in science conference, held at Imperial College London in partnership with Nature.
In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series that revisits some of the conference themes, Morgan says successful collaborations across scientific disciplines rely on individual researchers seeing themselves as “outsiders, beginners...