Whereas new, exciting results are the engine driving scientific progress, we’ve seen how an obsession with ‘groundbreaking’ results has led to entire fields of research being based on flimsy, unreplicable evidence. To paraphrase the biologist Ottoline Leyser, the point of breaking ground is to begin to build something; if all you do is groundbreaking, you end up with a lot of holes in the ground but no buildings.13
