Hello and welcome to Backchats. If the Nature podcast is 1% inspiration, then Backchat is 99% perspiration.

Yes, Backchats back with our first show of 2018. It's also my Backshat debut. If it's yours,

then this show is a bit more freeform than the regular podcast and is a personal take on the latest

stories from our team of reporters and editors. In today's roundtable discussion, we'll be trying

to quantify the role that luck has to play in research, looking at how to report on the iterative

nature of science, and how to avoid hyping the high tech. I'm Benjamin Thompson, and joining me on

today's show are Heidi Ledford.

I cover biomedical research primarily, but sometimes I write stories about plants as well.

Lizzie Gibney. Hi, I am a reporter here in London and I cover their physical sciences.

And Devaday Castelvecki. I do physical sciences also, I guess maybe I would be the black hole correspondent.

Coming up on the show, we'll be talking about lucky breaks.

Is serendipity an important driving factor in science, or is it an unhelpful stereotype in the discovery process?

Can we nudge the finger of fortune to point in our direction?

We'll also be looking at a blooming debate

about the first flower. In science, new research can be contentious. How do we go about reporting

it? Is there ever a time when a debate can truly be put to bed? Finally, we'll be taking a peek

at the quantum internet. Will it help me load cat gifs faster than ever before?

And how do we avoid over-hyping it?

Firstly then, science is littered with famous examples of fortitude.

I think that Alexander Fleming's discovery of mould juice, which you might know as penicillin,

is perhaps one of the most famous.

Nature had an editorial a few weeks back looking at whether

...