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Comment by gz5 | Hacker News Reader

>In a field trial, researchers added abamectin, a pesticide that kills nematodes, to the paper. They also planted potatoes in banana paper without abamectin as a control.

Kudos to the NC state team for setting up this control, and digging into the results, especially when the purpose of their experiments was different (their intent was to find a better way to deliver pesticides).

It is amazing how many times this happens - unintended or unanticipated results from an experiment, often peripheral results, which turn out to be extraordinarily interesting (usually for a different purpose as the original experiment), if observed and followed-up on with rigor and innovation.

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One example of this was a study of how electrical currents affect bacteria. E. coli were grown in a medium through a which a current was being passed. Weird effects were seen, and eventually this was traced not to the current, but to a chemical that was being produced at one of the platinum electrodes. And thus was discovered the biological effect of cisplatin, today a standard chemotherapy drug for many kinds of cancer.

Nice one - didn't know that. Penicillin is maybe the most famous example? The Wizard and the Prophet (Mann) and How Innovation Works (Ridley) also show how combinations of these types of discoveries (many of them in different fields, being studied for other purposes, etc.) over multi-year periods often results in world-changing level outcomes.

The discovery of LSD is another.

The very best scientific breakthroughs are announced with the words "Huh? That's weird!"

Also, a good signal for programmers to dig deeper into strange software behavior.

If a C or C++ programmer did that they'd never find their way out of the rabbit hole.

Sadly, in the tech world, phrases like "It's acting weird, try a reboot." are the opposite of this.

Every time something isn't behaving as it should, somewhere in the bytes of RAM will be the reason it isn't working properly. You could dump that ram and single step the code to find the fault. And then fix it for the millions of other people out there.

Or you could just reboot, and the problem will be erased, and probably never happen again to you for many years, by which time you'll have moved onto new hardware anyway.

In the tech world the "huh, that's weird" can apply to users using your app to solve problems in unexpected ways.

Because 99% of the time understanding the root cause is not interesting or valuable. When you find a bug you won't accidentally discovery the cure for some disease. You'll fix it, and a low impact, intermittent issue that could be mitigated with a restart is now gone.

When you find a bug you shall be able to learn and not make the same mistake again.

Which suggests the funding going directly to cancer research remains the waste energy done in vain. When its just random other research that winds up having the most efficacy.

I don't see a logical path from one to the other.

There was a lot of research between "discovering this cool chemical has an effect on bacteria" and "it's now the standard treatment curing 85% of testicular cancers."

What a short sighted commitment.

1) a lot of cancer research occurred between the random bacteria observation and viable chemotherapy.

2) ignoring the above, you still have too compare the success rate of funding cancer research vs random experiments.

Fun fact: abamectin an analog of ivermectin, differing only by a single double-bond. It is used in both agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

I'm reminded of the discovery that grapefruit impacts how drugs are processed by the body.

If I'm remembering correctly, the scientists were trying to find a way to see if alcohol impacted some drug, but wanted the measurement to be blind. So don't participants would need to drink alcohol without being sure if they had or not. The author and his wife spent a lively evening trying to find some kind of mix that hid the alcohol and found grapefruit to be very good at it.

Then when the actual study ran, they had participants take the drug or a control as well as vodka with grapefruit or just grapefruit. And to their surprise, the grapefruit had a massive effect regardless of the vodka!

Yes. The VW emissions scandal comes to mind:

"But vindication implies that we are out to get somebody. And we weren't. We had no idea that this was out there."

https://www.npr.org/2015/09/24/443053672/how-a-little-lab-in...

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