Thanks for reading! And the essay you wrote on this topic is equally interesting.

I get what you are saying, and you are right that what I am proposing is innately unscientific. What I am trying to say is that the process of making new science often has to have these flaws, because ideas in the real world are rarely evaluated on their merits alone. Ideas come from people who are fallible and have to fit their ideas into a social context. What you hold to be the ideal:

    Scientific findings must be able to rise above their origins and stand alone

is the same as what I hold to be ideal, and I also mentioned it's what my dad admires about science. But the reality is more complicated: when a fresh result comes out of a lab, people judge it by the affiliations of the authors, what journal it came from, and that person's prior ideas and assumptions, because replicating or depending on the truth of that result could be a costly mistake (millions of dollars, years of work). The sparsity of biological research in particular means that there are sometimes only a few labs in the world that can readily run experiments with any relevance to a given topic, so until enough attention is given for it to be replicated, a single result and corresponding "story" pretty much stands solely on the reputation of the authors.

So while it is absolutely correct that a scientific principle should stand on its own, and those principles are the ones we learn in the college intro courses, until a hypothesis gathers enough supporting data to become a principle (let's say it is only a few years old), the process of science at the margins is inherently social.

I didn't even get into matters of ethics and politics. For example, there are important medical principles today that were gathered through highly unethical (and regrettable) research in the early 20th century; if similar experiments were performed today, the experimenters would be vilified and the results discarded out of principle, even if it was robustly scientific with a significant impact.