How can educators provide children with a genuine experience of carrying out an extended scientific investigation? And can teachers change the perception of what it means to be a scientist? These were key questions that lay behind "The Human Condition" project, an initiative funded by the Primary Science Teaching Trust to explore a new approach to science teaching. One of the main objectives for the project was to help children develop a more positive perception of science as a subject: to see science as an inquisitive, creative, and evidence-based way of thinking rather than a body of knowledge and skills that need to be learned. Gareth Metcalfe wanted to show the children that they all have the capacity to think and act scientifically. The "Human Condition" project would force the children out of their normal scientific enquiry comfort zones as they would be investigating, testing, and measuring patterns of human behaviour. In this project, the children were not investigating a fixed, universal property, but looking at the strength of cause-and-effect relationships, where they have to examine the validity of their data, a critically important scientific principle. This project has shown the importance of giving children a genuine experience of science--the freedom to experiment and develop their own lines of enquiry in increasingly complex scenarios. In giving children these experiences, we develop young people with the tenacity, creativity and inspiration to become the ground-breaking scientists of the future.