No work is wasted if it gives a clearer picture of something. Even if you get disproven, it just means that you found one of the dark parts of the picture. Now sure, people mostly remember the ones that discover the brighter parts of the image. But the whole picture is still made of both the dark and bright parts. We don't just need to know what works, we also need to know for sure what DOESN'T work. Or else we'll never know the real bounds of something.

Now if you don't mind, i'll go back to slamming my head against analysis.

It's not a failure in the usual sense we think about it, no. You were still "technically wrong" in whatever hypothesis you had that was disproven. But the end result is different because theoretically everyone involved cares more about the answer being found, not necessarily that they are the one to do it.

Hell, in cases where whatever you did was later proven incorrect it's usually that whatever you did was the most correct answer for the information we had at the time. Then new information is discovered and often someone else builds off what you did to get this new answer.

If all is being done on the up and up, nobody's got an agenda to push, they're actually doing science: no. Doing an experiment, publishing results, and then having your peers replicate your experiment and be unable to reproduce your results is not failure. In the words of Adam Savage, "It's not 'my experiment failed,' it's 'my experiment yielded data.'" But also, if one scientist gets a result and no one else does, the real thing we learn might be in finding out why.

REPEAT is a part of the scientific process.