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This is exciting. Chemistry is so stuck in the old ways, maybe things are finally changing. And i don't think is has to be expensive. Someone has to come up wit

by jona-f 4y ago

This is exciting. Chemistry is so stuck in the old ways, maybe things are finally changing. And i don't think is has to be expensive. Someone has to come up with a simple protocol to declare a chemical reaction (inputs, outputs, temp, pressure, time, yield, link to paper) and then it must become fashionable to publish this data with your paper. The resulting database shouldn't be too big for all chemical reactions. Unfortunately published data so far is highly questionable. I can totally confirm this quote from wikipedia: "A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers [..] on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Swizec 4y ago
I remember talking to a friend who was doing a PhD in microbiology (implementing NAND gates in bacterial DNA) and she said reproducibility in chemistry/biology is a major pain. They couldn’t even reliably reproduce experiments within the same lab. You’d have one postdoc do the pipetting and the experiment worked. Another person tried, following the same procedures with the same equipment in the same room at the same time of day in the same environment … experiment failed. My takeaway was that a lot of this bio stuff is inherently flakey and/or poorly understood. We kinda mostly know what’s going but it’s really lots of trial and error and chasing statistical variations/effects. Best you can do is “it works N% of the time”
- myst1 4y ago
  That's mostly true in the biological sciences (biochem included), less so in chemistry.
xnorswap 4y ago
It's worth noting here that % of researchers and % of attempts are very very different things. You can have a system where 100% of researchers have failed to replicate another experimental result while 99.999% of results are replicable. That's not to suggest that's what's actually happening here, because the replication crisis is well discussed, but it's not a good statistic to measure things with.

by jona-f 4y ago

Swizec 4y ago

I remember talking to a friend who was doing a PhD in microbiology (implementing NAND gates in bacterial DNA) and she said reproducibility in chemistry/biology is a major pain. They couldn’t even reliably reproduce experiments within the same lab. You’d have one postdoc do the pipetting and the experiment worked. Another person tried, following the same procedures with the same equipment in the same room at the same time of day in the same environment … experiment failed. My takeaway was that a lot of this bio stuff is inherently flakey and/or poorly understood. We kinda mostly know what’s going but it’s really lots of trial and error and chasing statistical variations/effects. Best you can do is “it works N% of the time”

myst1 4y ago
That's mostly true in the biological sciences (biochem included), less so in chemistry.

xnorswap 4y ago

It's worth noting here that % of researchers and % of attempts are very very different things. You can have a system where 100% of researchers have failed to replicate another experimental result while 99.999% of results are replicable. That's not to suggest that's what's actually happening here, because the replication crisis is well discussed, but it's not a good statistic to measure things with.