When a researcher gets proved wrong, that means the scientific method is working. Scientists make progress by re-doing each other’s experiments—replicating them to see if they can get the same result. More often than not, they can’t. “Failure to reproduce is a good thing,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. “It happens a lot more than we know about.” That could be because the research was outright fraudulent, like Wakefield’s. But there are plenty of other ways to get a bum result—as the Public Libary of Science’s new collection of negative results, launched this week, will highlight in excruciating detail.
Unfortunately, it's often the wrong science that gets published in the media and the public is never notified as to the error. This is why there is an anti-vaccine movement and crackpots tell us to eat a lot of diabetes-causing grains and stay away from life-saving eggs.