Science pays for the same failure many times over, and nobody involved is doing anything wrong.
A lab spends two years on an approach and it doesn't work. That result closes a door, and there are only so many doors, which makes it worth knowing.
It goes nowhere. No journal wants it. No grant renewal rewards it. There's a quiet professional cost to saying out loud that two years produced a no. So it stays in the lab, in a drawer, in the memory of a postdoc who has since left for industry.
Then another lab has the same idea. It's a good idea, which is why two groups had it. They spend their two years. Same result, same silence. Somewhere a third group is writing the grant application right now.
Failure is how the search works. The problem is that each failure gets paid for repeatedly, by people who had no way of knowing it had already been bought.
This follows from how research gets funded. The reliable way to be paid is to produce results that look like forward motion, and a no doesn't look like that from the outside.
Change who's paying and the pressure changes shape. A group that pooled money to find out whether something works has no stake in the answer being yes. They wanted to know. If it's a no, that's what they bought, and there's nothing to protect by keeping quiet.
Most of what follows from that hasn't been built yet. It's a different starting position, and starting positions compound.
