https://www.wired.com/story/wireds-7-big-science-stories-that-shaped-2019/ > The practice of science is about progress: Crafting knowledge out of hunches and experiments, finding life-saving remedies, informing sound policies. It doesn't always go as planned. > Scientists would have struggled to predict, for example, that the Human Genome Project would decades later yield powerful tools for badge-wearing detectives, or that the 19th-century search for a sustainable alternative to elephant ivory would propel a boom in plastics that then contaminated every corner of the natural world. The good, the bad, the unintended—the biggest breakthroughs have a way of slipping out of their prescribed boxes.