I really don't understand Glenn's argument.
Edison wasn't really a very bright person, just persistent. He
BRUTE FORCED his inventions rather than using his brain. While that can work, it's like playing the lottery or mindlessly sifting through Wonka bars for a golden ticket. (He also ripped off some other people's inventions and just got lucky in court but that's a whole other matter.)
Trial and error is a part of science, yes, but Edison's ignorance meant he worked
hard, not
smart.
I'd like to think we should set the bar higher for medical R&D in the 21st century.
What you decide to try should not be purely random but based on sound principles. Yes, a glorified hunch, but better than just throwing darts against the wall. I'm not accusing Frequency Therapeutics of randomly throwing darts, just expanding on my critique of Zugzug wanting to pin a medal on failure.
That being said, the reason why the meme video stings is that hindsight is 20/20. If indeed the lawnmower effect has occurred (and I'm not even sure that's the case--the positive case for FX-322 even working at all is weak) then it's something they
should have anticipated. Likewise history is full of many preventable disasters, like the O-rings on the Challenger or that space probe that got lost because of confusion over Metric vs. Imperial systems. So I think it's really not a great thing to glorify failure. There are honest failures and then there are dumb ones. Many many failures are a matter of not using common sense and being careless. That's BAD SCIENCE.
It is odd, though, that this thread is so split to the point where optimists/evangelists are struggling to even understand why we're not jumping for joy over where things stand. Mystifying. I don't know how many more times I or other realists can try to expound on things before it becomes a futile waste of effort.