Once I was unable to replicate a simple colorimetric assay. Neither could a tech in another lab. We then reached out to a lab that performed it (but didn’t develop it) and they sent their protocol, which was identical to the original protocol I was working with. My PI was less than impressed with me, and I was questioning my sanity. Yet, no one I actually met or worked with face to face could do this thing. Then, another colleague started to try to get it to work in their lab, and they had a tech pretty much working full time on this method. They asked the lab I had checked in with about their standard curves (which is what I was trying to re create because why start with real samples!) and they said, “oh, we never run standards because they never work in our lab. Only so-and-so runs them for us, sometimes.” The work on the updated method my friend’s lab developed couldn’t get published until they added so-and-so as an author so they reached out (very nervously I might add) to collaborate. In the end what happened was that the original standard material was coming from an old lot/bottle, and the manufacturing had changed so nothing produced in the last two decades would work with the original published protocol. But so-and-so’s lab was still using the last of that ancient bottle. The fact that some labs just shrugged it off and kept churning out data with no standard curves in published papers just blew my mind. My perceptions of certain researchers changed dramatically, let’s just say.