It’s not often you hear a scientist praise the virtues of failure, but this week’s guest on the Inquiring Minds podcast is no ordinary scientist. Stuart Firestein, who previously wrote a book about ...

“Doubt is our product,” a tobacco executive observed in the late 1960s, infamously summing up the effort to undercut the link between smoking and cancer. Since then, many other industries have ...

Failure is nothing to disparage — at least in research. Indeed, it’s one of the principal “engines that propel science forward,” argues Stuart Firestein in the provocative new book Failure. A ...

Stuart Firestein is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his highly popular course on ignorance invites working scientists to come talk to ...

There are hundreds of receptors in the human nose that can pick up thousands of odors with each sniff. But how do we make sense of the scents? Smell researchers Stuart Firestein and Donald Wilson ...

Keeping The Russian Revolution AliveWhen Vladimir Lenin — leader of the Russian Revolution — died, Stalin hired two scientists to preserve his body. A new play called Lenin's Embalmers explores the ...

The following is an excerpt from Failure: Why Science is So Successful, by Stuart Firestein. A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself. —Gertrude Stein I have chosen this ...