WOMBAT

Most bona fide scientists aren't interested in spending their valuable time testing what seem to be obviously bogus assertions. WOMBAT is an acronym meaning "Waste Of Money, Brains And Time". Examples include spending three years and thousands of dollars studying homeopathy, reiki, acupuncture, or any other form of bullshit tooth fairy science.

The term also denotes any efforts spent investigating the purported therapeutic effects of any form of "healing" that has no plausible mechanism or is promoted by Dr. Oz.

At first glance, it might seem nonchalant or even Orwellian of scientists to ever refuse calls to either unconditionally study some issue when asked to or to step back and let cranks present their own "findings".

The fundamental problem, however, is that those refusing the scientific consensus only do so because they've got a dog in the race themselves. Besides, they wouldn't settle for anything but their favored conclusion anyways.

And to add insult to injury, it doesn't help when the proposed thing to be studied is already known to be fallacious, or is logically incoherent to begin with.

Alternative medicine
Great Britain spends more than 500 million pounds each year on disproven or unfounded therapies. And that figure probably doesn't even take into account retail therapy.

Each year, the US wastes a quarter of a billion dollars on the National Center for Complementary Alternative Medicine and OCCAM, or whatever they have been rebranded as. After several decades and several billion dollars, these two organizations have yet to produce a single productive result.

Gravity Foundation
The Gravity Research Foundation was founded and funded by a successful businessman in the hopes of finding means of either harnessing or defeating gravity (yes, defeating &mdash; the founder, Roger Babson, wrote an essay titled Gravity &mdash; Our Enemy Number One). Since 1948, the organization has been doling out thousands of dollars for essay contests about gravity and funding research on materials that might dampen the effects of gravity (which isn't possible under general relativity). The Gravity Research Foundation has, since the late 1960s, shed its crackpot atmosphere, and has attracted reputed contributors such as Stephen Hawking, who won their essay contest in 1971.

Morgellons
After a focused letter-writing campaign to the CDC, Congress, and other authorities, the CDC decided to do a study on the purported disease Morgellons. After two years and many many lab tests, the CDC concluded that Morgellons was just The response by Morgellons-related associations was that it must surely be a conspiracy.

Research on an actual wombats
While research on why wombats have cube-shaped feces may sound like a WOMBAT, having won the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize in physics, there may be actual real-world applications in manufacturing based on the research.