Tacit knowledge

 A new startup company is trying to discover the hidden factors that make some scientific experiments succeed and others fail.  For example, one lab succeeded in detecting the Covid virus, but another, using the same protocols, failed.  

To determine how this happens, the company’s researchers are closely monitoring scientists as they work. Cameras capture their every move, and the scientists narrate their work into microphones. Artificial intelligence adds to the narrative with explanations such as “The operator resuspends the pellet by pipetting it up and down ten times.”  The idea is to capture science as it happens in such a way that artificial intelligence models can be trained to recognize every object the scientists used and every action they performed.

When scientists carry out experiments, they keep careful records in their lab notebooks. Subsequent researchers use those records to repeat the experiment. Sometimes the repeated experiment doesn’t work. That’s because not every detail got written down.

Scientists make thousands of minor decisions over the course of a day, such as how they shake a test tube. Such decisions are based on “tacit knowledge": the practical know-how, skills, and intuition that are difficult to write down, explain, or teach to others. Some researchers consistently get experiments to work, but they don’t know why. According to their colleagues, they have magic hands.

In reviewing the lab scientists’ audio and video records, researchers are finding that the workers are performing the same experiment in many different ways. As one analyst noted, “The variation we see even among well-trained scientists is pretty jaw-dropping.”

The researchers are going to have to sift through all this information in hopes of finding the secrets of success. Who knows? Maybe AI can figure it out.

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