The real world isn't a perfect laboratory, so sometimes you must make do with data supplied by accidents and coincidences ;) Having said that, yes, it's truly

The real world isn't a perfect laboratory, so sometimes you must make do with data supplied by accidents and coincidences ;) Having said that, yes, it's truly depressing that politics can't seem to wait for proper results. As one of the most influential papers in my field of study (STS) says, "the speed of political decision-making is faster than the speed of scientific consensus formation." Sometimes this is forgivable -- if global warming is real, we can't afford to wait for its ill effects to become obvious, can we? -- but in other times, big-P politics just gets in the way of a good research program. Throwing in a bunch of confounding factors halfway through an experiment and whatnot.