Reminds me of my favorite story from my favorite chemistry professor (who has a number of them, or at least bon mots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_S._Ke

Reminds me of my favorite story from my favorite chemistry professor (who has a number of them, or at least bon mots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_S._Kemp#Quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_S._Kemp#Quotes). He related how a chemical company, using the pot method (smaller quantities done one reaction at a time in a vessel, vs. mass quantities where each reaction is "a factory"), had the yields of one of their products go to hell all of a sudden. They searched, and probed, and just could not find the cause, until they video monitored it 24x7. Upon which they found that a night watchman was relieving himself into the vat. The yield problem started when he semi-retired and worked fewer nights, the good yields happened when he did his thing ^_^. Like this Nobel prize winner who had to retract/repudiate a result from 1960 when he didn't realize nickle contamination was a key to the reaction, this company didn't realize everything in their process.