"Learn from your mistakes." Growing up, I've heard this phrase so many times, and have tried to be diligent about not repeating my mistakes. But, I think an important addendum to the popular adage is: "Learn from your mistakes, and learn from the mistakes of others".
Origins of science was offered in my high school and I did not take it at the time in order to "focus on other topics". As I began to realize how interdisciplinary everything today is, I began to lament not having paid more attention to history. Many techniques in one research area can be applied to other research areas, yielding great results.
Consider biology, in particular MRIs. In the past, these images were analyzed by hand. Applying signal processing and imaging techniques can automate this process, drastically improving the analysis time. I don't know if it occurred this simply, but I'd wager that some revelation like this sparked the birth of computational biology, a research topic that currently has a lot of open ground for improvement.
On a related note, I believe there are three types of science: groundbreaking, where the discovery completely revolutionizes the way we view something; incremental, where we learn a little bit of something new; and interdisciplinary, where we take ideas in one field and apply them to another in a previously unexplored method.
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