<div dir="ltr">amen.<div><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Dave Farber via ip</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ip@listbox.com">ip@listbox.com</a>></span><br>Date: Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 9:45 AM<br>Subject: [IP] In science, irreproducible research is a quiet crisis<br>To: ip <<a href="mailto:ip@listbox.com">ip@listbox.com</a>><br><br><br><div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Hendricks Dewayne</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dewayne@warpspeed.com" target="_blank">dewayne@warpspeed.com</a>></span><br>Date: Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 12:29 PM<br>Subject: [Dewayne-Net] In science, irreproducible research is a quiet crisis<br>To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <<a href="mailto:dewayne-net@warpspeed.com" target="_blank">dewayne-net@warpspeed.com</a>><br><br><br>[Note: This item comes from friend Bob Frankston. Bob's comment:'Why risk jeopardizing your funding by trying to reproduce results and showing that the money wasn’t well spent?'. DLH]<br>
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In science, irreproducible research is a quiet crisis<br>
By Carolyn Johnson<br>
Mar 19 2015<br>
<<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/03/19/science-irreproducible-research-quiet-crisis/xunxnfuzwdwYSpVjkx2iQN/story.html" target="_blank">http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/03/19/science-irreproducible-research-quiet-crisis/xunxnfuzwdwYSpVjkx2iQN/story.html</a>><br>
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Even when no one’s done anything obviously wrong, scientific experiments sometimes yield results that turn out to be incorrect. When Doug Melton’s team at Harvard University discovered betatrophin, a hormone that could trigger the pancreas to make beta cells lost in diabetes, their 2013 paper was touted as a breakthrough. But when they redid the experiment and increased the number of animals, the original result didn’t quite hold up. The hormone’s effect was far weaker than first reported.<br>
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As so often happens, the biology at work was more complex than it originally seemed. Melton is continuing a long list of experiments to understand how betatrophin works. He vows to publish the results, whether they point to a diabetes therapy or not.<br>
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To many in the scientific community, this was an example of how science self-corrects. It was Melton’s lab, along with an outside group, that identified the problems in the earlier work. Yet the case also exemplifies a broader problem in the research world. The rush to celebrate “eureka” moments often overshadows a rather mundane activity on which science depends: repetition. Any finding needs to be “reproducible” — confirmed in other labs — if it is to matter.<br>
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But talk to a scientist long enough, and you’ll probably hear a story like this: An intriguing new discovery was reported in a research journal. Maybe it was a biologist describing a new Achilles’ heel in cancer cells, a psychologist’s profound insight into human behavior, or an astronomer’s finding about the first moments of the universe. The scientist read about the finding and tried to confirm it in her own lab, but the experiment just didn’t come out the same.<br>
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Evidence of a quiet crisis in science is mounting. A growing chorus of researchers worry that far too many findings in the top research journals can’t be replicated. “There’s a whole groundswell of awareness that a lot of biomedical research is not as strongly predictive as you think it would be,” said Dr. Kevin Staley, an epilepsy researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. “People eventually become aware because there’s a wake of silence after a false positive result,” he added. The same is true in every field of science, from neuroscience to stem cells.<br>
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Ideally, science builds on and corrects itself. In practice, the incentives facing scientists can hamper the process. It’s more exciting and advantageous to publish a new therapeutic approach for a disease than to revisit a past discovery. Yet unless researchers point out the limitations of one another’s work, the scientific literature can end up cluttered with results that are partially or, in some cases, not at all true.<br>
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Recently, researchers and the US government alike have sought to assess how much research is irreproducible — and why — and are looking for systematic ways to retest experiments that make headlines but yield no further progress.<br>
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[snip]<br>
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</div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">Dave Täht<br>Let's make wifi fast, less jittery and reliable again!<br><br><a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb" target="_blank">https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb</a><br></div>
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