[ericmcer]

Agree this seems like basic things you would figure out doing anything uncertain. The first blocked out quote of the article is:

“If an experiment doesn’t go as expected, it doesn’t necessarily mean you did something wrong.”

That’s why it's called an experiment… I don’t get why this is insightful.

I guess there is a lesson about carefully noting down failures, in the corporate world handing over a document detailing all the things you tried that failed is much better than just failing silently.

[zik]

In biochem results aren't "success" or "fail", they're more like "probably success" and "either fail or experimental error". And in research the vast majority of results are in the latter category so it can be hard to discriminate between failures of your hypothesis and failures in your experimental method.