# 40. Discard unfavourable data ## 40.5. Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species ### 40.5.4. Trial termination – it's not going well Very often, when a large-scale trial is failing to produce the expected and hoped for results, the trial is terminated. This also happens when a trial is producing results contrary to the expected results, and when a trial is producing highly negative results, in which case the trial is urgently terminated to avoid the leakage of any negative results. Morally, unless there is an ethical risk such as a risk to human life, all planned trials should continue, regardless of how convenient the researcher finds the results. Simply getting "inconvenient" results is not an honest reason to terminate a trial. Nonetheless, clinical trials and other scientific studies are routinely terminated because it becomes obvious that the results are not going to fit with the hidden agendas of the trial sponsors.