Biographies of failures are not the same as negative results in science. A negative result has value and it may not be as sexy as a positive result but should be published if not for anything more than to prevent other people from going down the same path or to add more data in meta studies. Also, negative or positive depends on how the original hypothesis is framed. One person could claim that X has no effect on Y as the null hypothesis, and another could claim that X has an effect on Y, and the same results would give a positive result for one, and negative for another.
I don't think negative vs. positive is a useful bifurcation here, both for biographies and scientific results. I'd rather we do interesting/surprising vs boring/expected. In other words, can we learn something from this? There are biographies of "failures" that are full of wisdom and reflection, as well as biographies of "successes" that have stumbled upon the success without so much as a second thought, and vice versa. Same for scientific results.
