Quotes from Chemistry...Part 9!

“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work”. 
                   -Richard Feynman, in his 1965 Nobel speech

This is a matter that has plagued me throughout my whole time in academics as a researcher. In addition to that, I think it plagues science as a whole-- a problem where the actual story of scientific discoveries is lost amid the reporting of results.
Right now, science news report the results of some study that builds upon an earlier idea and the implications (far-reaching or near-sighted) for a greater audience. But there's a more exciting story to be told. To borrow from a fellow science communication colleague (and dashing gent in a bowler) Dr. Matthew Francis, "Science, is incremental. News, on the other hand, isn't."
News doesn't tell the full wandering story of how the discoveries are made. It doesn't tell about the failures, the frustrations, the late nights nor the moments where one is grasping at victory. You never hear in a news story-

 "Johnson was up until two in the morning running that analysis, because that machine is used so much it's the only time she could fit it in. The fumes of her 5pm coffee were just burning out and as the fuzziness of exhaustion began to close around her, the last scan completed sealing the confirmation of her hypothesis." HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE!?

"That's not an easy pipette, John. Jeez!"

Blind alleys, as Feynman calls them, are what drive scientists to keep asking new questions and probing new territory.

Granted, not all narratives are equally compelling. Many are downright dull without manufactured drama. But I think having added emphasis about the process of gathering results could add to the public perception about what scientists actually do. This could be beneficial in breaking down the caricature that has haunted popular perception for so long. It could paint scientists as the normal people we are, just doing our jobs too. Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything  is hands down, my favorite book ever. That's saying something for those that know my love of The Lord of the Rings and Redwall.
In the book, Bryson tells a number of anecdotes from many different disciplines of science from a really human perspective. These were people he was talking about. He painted the picture as such. He talked about where they were from, what piqued their curiosity, and about the context (most often accident) in which their big discovery was made.
That's a story I think is missing from a lot of science reporting. The "socially distant and awkward" researcher is (largely) a myth. The next time you read an article about a new scientific discovery, just take a moment to ponder how many ideas died on the chopping board, how many cups of coffee were consumed, and how many facepalms occurred in pursuit of that result.

Image (http://www.beyond.com/articles/top-schools-for-medical-lab-technicians-10959-article.html)