There are frequent complaints regarding the lack of “negative results” in scientific publishing. It can be unpleasant to report a failure, or even a lack of success, but our body of knowledge advances with reports of things that did not work as well as those that did. A few such negative results have become justly famous, but for each significant non-result there are probably thousands of less significant non-results. This selective reporting suggests that science is carried forward by the work of brilliant minds who make no mistakes, continually and efficiently pushing forward the envelope of our knowledge. But real science is filled with trial and error, ranks of experiments that fail or give ambiguous results.