Most Scientists ‘Can’t Replicate Studies by Their Peers’
February 23rd, 2017Via: BBC:
Science is facing a “reproducibility crisis” where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests.
This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.
From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.
“The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable.
The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.
Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.
After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies’ findings.
Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result.
“It’s worrying because replication is supposed to be a hallmark of scientific integrity,” says Dr Errington.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. There are great scientists out there, but many (most) have been co-opted into manipulating data to serve the needs of their administrations. No science is ever settled, any true scientist is open to any new data available, until that information has been disproven. Science is the new dogma, which is the exact opposite of its purpose. Great article, the more these people can be data checked, the better.
Duras, agreed.
‘Henry Pool Is Here’ is a dark comedy that does really clever job at demonstrating how faith in science itself can become a religion (with as much misdirection and bullshit).