Pierre Menard is a fictional (?) character invented by Borges in his relatively famous story "
Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote". In the story, which is, according to some, an indirect essay on translation, Menard is a French scholar who in the course of his life has devoted most of his efforts NOT to translate, modernize or adapt the most famous novel of all time but to literally RE-write it. That is, not to transcribe it but instead to be able to reproduce it word by word and down to the last punctuation mark.
Menard passed away while still in the process of this unprecedented endeavour, having nonetheless been able to complete chapters 9, 38 and a fragment of 22. After him, nobody has dared to undertake such a monumental work. That is, no fictional character. Because a great number of real people are involved in similar projects. Almost all of them are members of what we call the "scientific community".
The task of RE-writing a scientific paper, as meaningless as it may sound, IS the primary goal of a great deal of scientists nowadays. And apart from its obvious dullness it carries some additional significant difficulties.
First of all, lack of originality. This would not be a great problem if the intellectual activity of RE-search was not -so disturbingly often- preceded by the adjective "original". Over-riding this problem is still considered one of the greatest steps a respected RE-searcher needs to take in his career. And it so happens that once he is over the pseudo-guilt imposed by non-originality he is usually mature enough to be eligible for tenure.
Secondly, RE-writing a paper would imply -in a perfect universe- RE-peating the analyses carried out in the prototype. This constitutes a great waste of time, taxpayers' money and human effort on something that has been done already, but is nonetheless necessary if one is to stick to the rules. On a higher level this tedious activity of RE-petition bifurcates into two options. One is RE-peating the analysis to RE-produce the prototype's results. Let's take a pause here...
This would imply that the results of the prototype are RE-producible. And it may sound ironical but in a world of RE-written papers, results tend to be IR-RE-producible...At least most of the times.
But going back to our bifurcation, the second option provides a more or less simple way around the unpleasant problem of results RE-production. This (not-so-secret) option #2 implies, that one needs simply RE-produce the plots and the tables of the prototype bypassing the upsetting process of actually re-producing the data. This may sound displeasing to many of the inexperienced RE-searchers but I can assure them that it is simply their inexperience which drives them away from the real focus. Which -I dare remind them- is RE-writing a given scientific paper. How this is to be done, is a mere technicality.
Reflection and self-questioning is a grave danger to the exciting project of accurate re-production of knowledge. Once RE-writing the paper stops being the ultimate goal, RE-searchers, especially the young and inexperienced ones already mentioned, may easily follow the dangerous paths of skepticism and doubt, which mathematically lead to innovation, unconventional thinking and sudden impulses to explore unknown problems. It is needless to mention here the dire consequences such practices may have on modern science. Young RE-searchers should be particularly careful on this aspect. Nobody has told them that scientific RE-search is something to be taken lightly and one should be extremely cautious when attempting to RE-state once more, theorems, hypotheses and ideas already put forward thousands of times by hundreds of great pioneers of repetition.
But it is only after he has gone through it all, avoiding the upsets of novelty and ingenuity, that someone really grasps the natural joy that can be felt by the RE-production of originality.
Hταν γενναίο παιδί. 
