SXC.HU, MANKAEEvery practicing scientist knows how difficult it can be to make an experiment work in the lab. Especially frustrating is not being able to reproduce already published experiments. You read a paper, closely follow its materials and methods, buy all of the reagents, run across your department to secure all of the equipment, begin your experiment, and . . . it doesn’t work. At some point, after trying time and time again, stuck alone at midnight in the lab and pulling your hair out, you raise your eyes to the skies and ask: Why doesn’t it work? The paper was published in a prestigious scientific journal by a famous professor. I’ve done everything as written and still it doesn’t work. Why?
Nearly every researcher is well aware of this reproducibility problem, especially in the biological sciences. Accepting this situation as the status quo, however, just got a bit harder after the release of two studies by pharma giants Amgen and Bayer. The companies assigned groups of scientists to repeat experiments published by academic researchers in well-known scientific journals. The results were astonishing: only 10 to 30 percent of these studies were found to be readily reproducible.
Reproducibility is the foundation of science. It is the standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. So when published scientific findings can’t be validated by others, they can’t be taken at face value. In the current climate, battered by budget cuts and government shutdowns, you could ask: Who has time ...
