I lost a lot of faith in scientific research when I had to spend time reviewing patents in an early job. The fact that I was looking into battery materials (a

I lost a lot of faith in scientific research when I had to spend time reviewing patents in an early job. The fact that I was looking into battery materials (a notoriously over-hyped sector) certainly didn't help, but some of the approved parents were laughable. They included core materials which had been historically known to be useful in batteries (and hence shouldn't qualify for protection), but then also every possible element-wise substitution of the same structure - many of the resulting materials would not even have been stable, never mind viable as a battery component. There were also instances of multiple patents covering the same material, suggesting that any prior-art searches were not being done rigorously.