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This is why you have more than one project. And also backup projects for those projects. Every mature lab should have a simple turn the crank project for each student that's got the biochemistry worked out, and is just a matter of collecting observations and doing lengthy data analysis. Those are the lifesavers when the ambitious ones fall through.

I must have been involved in ~20 projects in my PhD. Only 3-4 will ever be published.

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This exactly. I filled hundreds of pages of behavioral data during my PhD. Although I don’t know the exact numbers, I’d wager that my publications came from only 20-25 pages of data.

If you anticipate low success rates, you can find success either through luck or through diligent experimentation with an expectation of null results. Null results which, by the way, can often improve your odds of downstream success.

Exactly.

Every lab usually has a few “I’ll bet it’ll work but I don’t have time to find out” projects.

But that’s actually a big part of doing independent research - using your time the most efficiently, so students need to get to the point where they have a dozen or so paths and they plan out the next year or two thinking about the best way to tackle them and “fail fast”.

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