From Nature’s obituary of Leslie Orgel (1927–2007) :

Although Orgel was a theoretician, he always demanded that theory be subject to rigorous experimental validation. This, he felt, was especially true in the field of the origins of life, where “theories are a dime a dozen and facts are in short supply”. He took great pleasure in a positive result, to the point of rooting for the pen on a graph-plotter during chromatography experiments. But he also delighted in negative results, because they pushed him to devise new hypotheses. This, of course, is the way scientists are supposed to behave, but Orgel was one of the few who actually did so.

The full obituary, by Gerald F. Joyce, is at Nature 450, 627; 2007.