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"Jo Handelsman remembers the moment she realized something was seriously wrong with the way science was taught. She was an undergraduate at Cornell University in her junior year, sitting in a biology lecture with an unusually good professor. "It suddenly occurred to me that every idea I had memorized or learned or thought I understood in a textbook was actually the result of scientific investigation," said Handelsman, who is now a professor at Yale. "And that just floored me." She also couldn't help thinking why she hadn't realized this before. "What was missing that it took me so long?""

"Stories of science are filled with eureka moments-from Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple-but the scientific process entails false starts and mistakes that are essential to success. In his new book, Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein makes a case for science as "less of an edifice built on great and imponderable pillars, and more as a quite normal human activity," and says "one must try to fail because it is the only strategy to avoid repeating the obvious.""