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Comment by untilHellbanned | Hacker News Reader

Ok so me-too apps like yet another photo sharing app is not cool, but me-too incremental biomedical research is cool.

Good to know we are all about innovation here.

In science, "me-too research" is also known as "replication", and it's one of the pillars of the scientific method. There should be more of it, not less (as recent crisis have shown). "Incremental research" is 99.999% of what scientists do. Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are very, very, very unusual scientists. That's a good sign, by the way -- if science was suffering major paradigm shifts every day, that would mean that no stable knowledge was being produced.

Keeping in mind that we are talking about extending the healthy lifespan of human beings -- that could be the people you love -- who cares about "being cool"?

Just a quick note pointing out that also Darwin and Einstein did 99.9% incremental research. Natural selection and evolution were well known concepts before the Origin of the Species, and so it was relativity. What Darwin and Einstein provided was just small steps forward, and a LOT of perspective over what was already there.

You don't even know if this is "me-too" — you just "bet" it is, and then hedge the description with "incremental," which allows that it might actually add something. There is literally no factual substance to the complaint. Your objection here is so shallow that the word "shallow" implies more depth than it actually has.

Ok so my 20 years in the field means nothing to trolls. I can live with that.

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