Basically it took many years before someone developed something that could be run with a trigger or button. Before that you used a vacuum (your mouth) to pull liquid into a pipette. Heard an older chemistry professor talk about a colleague who years before swallowed a salmonella sample by accident. A lot of people surely got hurt this way.
That’s ideally science but you’re gonna have low-impact papers if you don’t do the “look at this new thing I ‘proved’” song and dance. Publishing culture and self-promotion in academia make everything worse.
Incidentally, I know someone that tried publishing a paper to explain why a very common method actually led to bad results very often. It showed methodology and had verification from another group using independent materials. The paper was rejected because, “everyone knows that method X works great you must’ve done something wrong”.
There’s a lot of myth-making in how science works, following prescriptive announcements of “the scientific method”. In reality it’s just humans trying things out and using “good enough” ideas regardless of how well they are investigated. If the ideas are truly 100% wrong in a way that precludes further work, they’ll get discarded. But wrong ideas can still persist for decades or more so long as they don’t disrupt other things working well enough. That methodology earlier was “good enough” despite major flaws so the academy said, “it’s actually 100% right” right up until they abandoned the method (which they did for unrelated reasons).
More like “Industry” vs “Academia”. I love the work at the nonprofit academic lab, but I miss the cleanness, efficiency, and prettiness of the for-profit lab. 🥲
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