While I have never encountered a catastrophic failure for the clinical research we do in our lab, we have encountered a number of setbacks. The most common reason for these is rushing and failing to follow directions perfectly to maximize speed. One example was a situation where a large amount of clinical data was lost because a user entered the data quickly and proceeded to enter the next sequence of information without confirming that the previous sequences had been saved and processed. The data was lost, and some expensive and time-consuming procedures had to be repeated on our patients.

Of course, this is an example of a cause of failure not limited to just pre-clinical or clinical research. Do any of you have examples of similar reasons for failure?