Sometimes in science, you make hypotheses and experiments and then you go about doing the proposed research, but you don't come up with any tangible results. That is, you don't find anything that you were hoping to find. We call this a negative result. That makes it sound like a bad thing, which is maybe at least a little accurate, but its not entirely true. After all, Ponce de León never found the Fountain of Youth, but at least he found where it was NOT located! Thats gotta be worth a little something, right? At the very least, that is information that might be a little valuable to others who want to search for the Fountain. I got involved at that tail end of a project that was sequencing the genomes of a few pair of monozygotic (identical) twins where one twin had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) while the other had not. The hope was to identify some sort of rare DNA variant that might help explain why these seemingly genetically identical people exhibited different disease states. Unfortunately, our efforts yielded no smoking guns. I think one of the real challenges with negative results is finding a way to share them, not only so you might receive credit for your efforts, but to help those who may still be "searching for the Fountain of Youth". Lucky for us, there is a journal specifically interested in ALS and we were able to publish our work there. Even if we didn't solve very much, I'm just happy to have been included. That may very well summarize a career, at least mine, in research.
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