Writing for the
Chronicle of Higher Education last month, Paul Voosen covers the National Institutes of Health's work in encouraging reproducible research. (The article is behind a pay-wall, so I have not linked it here.) The NIH seems to be getting its act together. The article points to universities, however, as the weak link. "Indeed, more than any part of the scientific system, the universities have been ignoring the replication crisis," the article states, attributing the thought to Glenn Begley, author of the well known Amgen study of non reproducible research (Begley & Ellis, 2012). This has the ring of truth to me. As I've stated before, I commend the NIH for finally acknowledging the issue and taking steps to remedy it, some of which are detailed in the brief article. The NIH and other funding agencies, as well as prominent journals, must necessarily take a top-down approach. However this needs to be complemented by a bottom-up approach, the embracing of a cultural change by scientists in the trenches. Such a change will be opposed by those who benefit under the status quo, as Arturo Casadevall suggests in the article. The tight and thus highly competitive funding environment exasperates the problem, as his colleague Ferric Fang notes in the article. I would argue that scientists need to remember why they became scientists, and they need to be angry about the non-reproducible research that pollutes the academic literature. However, this is a tough thing to say when labs have to fight for funding survival. Anger and idealism don't do much good if your lab has gone out of business and you failed to achieve tenure. It's a conundrum.
I highly recommend Voosen's article to DTLR readers.
Reference
C. G. Begley and L. M. Ellis, 2012: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research.
Nature, 483: 531-533.
Paul Voosen, 2015: Amid a sea of false findings, the NIH tries reform.
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2015, page A12.
No comments:
Post a Comment