Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were really close to making a new discovery however last minute

Question: Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were really close to making a new discovery however last minute you discovered a flaw in your technique or results etc. which showed you'd done something wrong? if so how did you deal with it?
- Keywords:
  discovery,
  result,
  technique
Asked by anon-227024 to William, Thibaut "Tibo", Harry, Georgia, Emily, Aimee on 13 Nov 2019.
- William Wiseman answered on 13 Nov 2019:
  
  We often try to patent our work and when it comes to whether it is a new discovery, there is always something that comes up which we didn’t know about. Doesn’t always mean the discovery isn’t new but it may mean it is a smaller find than we had hoped for.
- Aimee Egglestone answered on 13 Nov 2019:
  
  No, but I have had the situation where I developed a process and had it working beautifully, but right before I approved it for plant I realised I had developed it right into someone else’s patent field! Which basically meant someone else already “owned” my lovely shiny new process!
- Emily Sparkes answered on 18 Nov 2019:
  
  Yep, I thought I’d found something interesting but couldn’t see it properly. It turns out I was measuring at the wrong wavelength so I tried the experiment again and then it just stopped working for no apparent reason. I would really like to say that I dealt with it in a mature manner but I had a temper tantrum and then left it for somebody else to fix. It’s very annoying because it’s so close! But I just got too frustrated with it and decided it needed a new pair of eyes/fresh perspective

Question: Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were really close to making a new discovery however last minute you discovered a flaw in your technique or results etc. which showed you'd done something wrong? if so how did you deal with it?

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