On Research Methods

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”1

This applies to data as much as people. You have to trust your methods enough to follow where they lead, even when the results surprise you.

In genomics research, we often start with hypotheses about what we’ll find. But the most interesting discoveries come when the data tells us we were wrong.2

The challenge is building robust enough methods that you can trust their unexpected results. If your pipeline is solid, surprises become insights rather than errors.

  1. Ernest Hemingway, though the exact source is disputed. Sometimes attributed to various contexts in his work.↩︎

  2. Some of the most significant biological discoveries were accidental: penicillin, X-rays, even the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique.↩︎