Now friends, let me tell you a tale of science that should sound familiar to anyone who ever had a mother with a recipe box. Imagine this: she tries out ten pies, and only the one that turns out half-decent ever gets written on the recipe card. The nine burnt, soggy, or oddly salty ones? Into the file drawer, never to be spoken of again.
That, my compatriots, is more or less how modern science runs. Publish the shiny pie, hide the ruined crusts. We call it the file drawer problem, but I call it plain foolishness.
Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And if we keep burying all the experiments that didn’t fit our tidy story, we end up knowing a whole lot of “just ain’t so.”
Elaine Ingham, who knows soil like a preacher knows parables, would remind us that even rotten scraps matter. In the compost pile, yesterday’s carrot top and spoiled cabbage leaf are tomorrow’s black gold. The same should be true in science—every failed experiment, every null result, every “huh, that’s odd” observation should be tossed into the great compost heap of knowledge. That’s how ecosystems thrive, whether microbial or intellectual.
Rob Knight and his gang of microbiome explorers know this in their bones. They swim in oceans of data where the stray outlier, the oddball bacterium, can end up rewriting what we thought was true about guts, brains, and even our moods. The power comes not from cherry-picking a few microbes that look good in a PowerPoint, but from seeing the whole messy community.
And then there’s Carl Sagan, whispering across the cosmos: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Trouble is, that “something” might already be hiding in a dusty spreadsheet on some graduate student’s hard drive. If we don’t let it out into the light, we’ll never hear its song.
So here’s my plea: let’s compost science. Publish the scraps, the flops, the failures, the sideways findings. Let them rot together until, like any good compost, they grow into something rich and surprising. Because the truth is not polite, nor linear. It’s stubborn, sprawling, and often disguised as a mistake.
Keep your mind open, and your file drawer emptier. The next clue to human betterment might be sitting quietly in the scraps.
That’s all I have to say, I will say no more.
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