Sure, there was a paper about yeast. They created a collection of 6000 clones- each one had a "single gene deletion" and nothing else. THey were able to study each clone and explain whether the gene deletion was fatal (IE, if you delete this gene that is essential for yeast to grow, the clones all die).
I was tasked to analyze the paper results, specifically a table that listed "all the genes we newly discovered that, when removed, are fatal".
Since I'm interested in overlapping genes, I took the list of new genes and intersected it with all the other known genes, and noticed that for each gene they newly discovered had a fatal outcome, it intersected a gene that was already known to be necessary for yeast to live (housekeeping genes, essential enzymes, dna checkpoint repair, etc).
The most likely conclusion from this is that when they deleted the gene, they also truncated or deleted the other gene, which abolished the function of the known-necessary gene. Therefore, they didn't discover anything new- they just disabled things that we already knew broke yeast, by accident, by ignoring the fact that genes overlapped.
I showed this to my advisor, who said "Good catch, why don't you write them a letter?" So I sent them a letter showing my results, never got a response back. They published a paper a year later, totally unapologetically, saying how they had "discovered interesting interactions between overlapping genes"...
You can also look back at the original human genome sequencing papers, they were massively overestimating the accuracy of the assembly and the representation of the genome (compared to the wider population). It took decades of additional large-scale sequencing to verify this, but it still bothers me just how overly egotistical and self-confident the folks who worked on the human genome project were.
