Always save your work!

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great article about the Miller-Urey experiment that we talked about in class. After the initial 1953 experiment, Stanley Miller redid the experiment again in 1958, but never analyzed his results. He kept the sample results in his lab, meticulously cross-referenced to his notes on the experiment and never looked at them again. When Miller died, he left all of his science stuff to his former student Jeffrey Bada. Bada had one of his students, Adam Johnson, analyze the samples and he found some very surprising results. Ed also discuses the relevance of the Miller-Urey experiment to the history of science. You can read the whole story here.