Why do people get vaccines? Don't they research the ingredients?

"

Boem wrote:

A new vacine against malaria got pushed out today.

The horror!

The succes rate is 4/10 of this new vacine, but in my book that's better then 0/10.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Scientists fail every day. Failure is an essential and inescapable part of scientific research. It’s baked right into the scientific method: observe, measure, hypothesize, and then test. Of course, that hypothesis is often wrong. When it is, scientists go back, observe more, get new measurements, come up with a new hypothesis and test again. And again.

Despite this, scientific failure is rarely talked about openly, which was why when University of Arizona astrophysicist Erika Hamden used her TED 2019 talk last week to share how her work has been characterized by setback after setback, it felt like a radical act. As she spoke, she seemed at times near tears. And yet the talk, video of which is not currently available on TED’s channels, was not just brave; it was inspiring.

“The reality of my job is that I fail almost all the time and still keep going,” Hamden said on the very first day of the weeklong conference that usually celebrates triumph.

Hamden was onstage as part of the fellows cohort for this year, a group of promising change-makers who are on the cusp of reinventing the world. Most people were there to hype up their impressive work, to tell TED why it was so important and incredible that it demanded the world’s attention.

Hamden told the story of a balloon that popped.

“FIREBall is weird as far as telescopes go because it’s not in space and it’s not on the ground,” she said. “Instead it hangs on a cable from a giant balloon and observes for one night only from 130,000 feet in the stratosphere, at the very edge of space.”

One night only. Now you start to see why the balloon popping was such a colossal failure. And it came, Hamden explained, on top of failure after failure leading up to this night. Sensor...