> Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.

Reminds me of Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" essay[1]

    One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment
    with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be
    quite right.  It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value
    for the viscosity of air.  It’s interesting to look at the history
    of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan.  If you
    plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger
    than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that,
    and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they
    settle down to a number which is higher.
    
    Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away?
    It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because
    it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number
    that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be
    wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be
    wrong.  When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t
    look so hard.  And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off,
    and did other things like that.  We’ve learned those tricks nowadays,
    and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

I would take Feynmans stories with a grain of salt, he was sometimes quite liberal with the facts when trying to make a point (in particular he liked to give the impression that he was the only smart guy in the room).

The actual history is a bit more complex and certainly is not reflected accurately in Feynmans retelling (maybe he was affected by confirmation bias?). See this stackoverflow discussion: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/44092/is-feynma...

context :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment

Assuming Feynmann's statement is true, I find it even more remarkable that Millikan's electron charge research was published in Science AND won him a Nobel Prize without anyone noticing the very apparent mistake of using an incorrect value for the viscosity of air.