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There is no reproducibility crisis in science. 1. Reproducing work is a waste of resources. Use the money and researcher hours to develop tools that are more r
by daughart 13y ago
There is no reproducibility crisis in science.
1. Reproducing work is a waste of resources. Use the money and researcher hours to develop tools that are more reliable, cheaper, and easier to use. A major reason why no one reproduces experiments is that the initial work was very difficult. Let's invest in technologies that make science easier. Reproduction (of experiments) should be done in high school biology classes.
2. Technical reproduction is rarely done, but conceptual reproduction is common. Findings in the literature become incorporated into disparate subsequent hypotheses tested by many other labs. If something doesn't add up, this will often increase the impact of the paper and eventually be addressed through experiments to resolve different models of the phenomenon.
3. There is no widespread fraud in science. Your academic career rests on your integrity. When I publish a paper, I do my damn best to make sure it is accurate. My reputation relies on it. When scientists continue to publish results that are false or fraudulent, they become discredited within the community. All graduate students in the life sciences are required to take a class on the ethics of science.
4. Publishing is a bitch and a source of real rot within the community. Fortunately, many researchers and academics recognize this problem and are addressing it. Look at the new journal eLife, or open access journals, or the increasing interest in arXiv.org (moving to a publishing model closer to that found in math and physics, which appear to be healthier research communities than life sciences). As experiments become more technically advanced, the expectation for methods sections have increased, not decreased.
5. People want to commercialize scientific findings that are relatively new - it's obvious that is risky! Why put the burden back on (under-funded) scientists? Drug companies are the ones that would benefit financially. Or wait until the phenomenon is better understood. Notice they're talking about drugs for complex diseases like cancer, metabolic disorder, etc., not Mendelian diseases. It's as if people complained that they couldn't get their lasers to work using a 1917 understanding of the physics of light. But Einstein demonstrated the fundamentals! Why did it take 40 years to make it work in practice?