"The process was outlined in a paper published today in Nature, and hints at the possibility of medical breakthroughs lurking in the data of failed experiments.

"The process was outlined in a paper published today in Nature, and hints at the possibility of medical breakthroughs lurking in the data of failed experiments." If there was some way to make sense of data from negative-results experiments reliably, it would be absolutely revolutionary and certainly turn our ideas about what constitutes a successful experiment onto its head. I am very hopeful for fruitful results from the methods outlined in this article. I worry about the usage of "failed" experimental data here, though. I've "failed" a lot of experiments for reasons other than not finding the effect I was looking for in my data. Any exploration of data from negative-results experiments needs to be taken very narrowly, with a deep understanding of exactly what effect is being examined. Experiments are frequently designed incorrectly for studying the effect they want, and are almost always not suitably controlled for examining non-primary effects. Try to find a trend throughout non-primary effects over a large swath of experiments, and I'm sure you will-- but it may be noise.