3. A nonprofit's effort to replicate 50 top cancer papers is shaking up labs.

A nonprofit's effort to replicate 50 top cancer papers is shaking up labs.

It's hard to imagine a university could organize this sort of activity. Labs wouldn't want to give time away to outsiders (undergrads) to come in and break equipment and take time away from their research. Grad students would take the brunt of this by having to train undergrads and fix the stuff they break, clearly creating a source of friction. The reality is that everyone in grad school is scrambling to come up with original research and get out, no time for checking other people's works because there is no incentive to do so: non-results are hardly ever published in Nature. The big impact journals are biased towards positive, flashy results.

It costs money to run experiments and a grad student has to do original research to get a PhD. Therefore no grad student will want to reproduce results because they know it doesn't get them any closer to get their degree. The people that would be willing to reproduce results would be undergrads (postdocs are out of the question because they too need original research to get a job) but they need to be trained. Once trained they are at the bottom of the pecking order of instrument use, and often undergrads are only given the training for tasks that are laborious but straightforward, in the economics of the lab sometimes it doesn't make sense to train an undergrad in certain characterization techniques because the lab won't be getting much out of the student because said student is going to leave in a year or most likely at the end of the summer.

So we are kind of stuck. Funding is awful right now so it is even harder today to try to convince another lab to reproduce results because that is not what they're being funded to do and they can't afford to risk breaking equipment on reproducing results that won't help them get further funding. There simply is no incentive to do this and I agree that this should change. I just don't see it changing under the current climate in which people have to publish or perish. And by publish I mean publish positive, flashy results, not necessarily good science.

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