Anyone who follows the latest
‘breakthroughs’ in health knows that these studies are constantly contradicting
themselves. Is coffee good for you or bad? What about wine? And what’s the
superfood de jour? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, rather it’s the very
nature of scientific inquiry. Someone does an experiment and gets a result,
someone else repeats the experiment and gets a different result, and over time
a consensus forms about what’s really going on.
The problem is that researchers
like to be the ones doing daring, novel experiments, and not the ones repeating
other people’s daring experiments. It’s not just a matter of ego, but also of
attracting grants and other sources of funding. This means that many studies
simply don’t get replicated. And unfortunately, unconfirmed studies have a bad habit of being wrong.
What can be done? Elizabeth Iorns
of the University of Miami has one possible solution. Her company (Science
Exchange) provides a new service called the Reproducibility Initiative.
Researchers submit their protocol to the Initiative and get matched with a
company that has the necessary technology to repeat that experiment. If they
get the same result, the original authors will be able to state that their data
has been independently corroborated.
It’s too early to tell how
effective this project will be. One possible drawback is that the original
research team will have to pay companies to reproduce their results. And of
course, some experiments are so complex that no commercial enterprises are
available to repeat them. You can’t just send samples out to your local
supercollider.
Even if this specific initiative
doesn’t pan out, it’s still a great idea. I hope it does lead to more attempts
to confirm results.
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