&quot;The process was outlined in a paper published today in Nature, and hints at the possibility of medical breakthroughs lurking in the data of failed experiments.&quot;<p>If there was some way to make sense of data from negative-results experiments reliably, it would be absolutely revolutionary and certainly turn our ideas about what constitutes a successful experiment onto its head. I am very hopeful for fruitful results from the methods outlined in this article.<p>I worry about the usage of &quot;failed&quot; experimental data here, though. I&#x27;ve &quot;failed&quot; a lot of experiments for reasons other than not finding the effect I was looking for in my data. Any exploration of data from negative-results experiments needs to be taken very narrowly, with a deep understanding of exactly what effect is being examined.<p>Experiments are frequently designed incorrectly for studying the effect they want, and are almost always not suitably controlled for examining non-primary effects. Try to find a trend throughout non-primary effects over a large swath of experiments, and I&#x27;m sure you will-- but it may be noise.