When a study fails to replicate, there are two possible interpretations. Perhaps so many of these new drugs fail to have an effect because the basic research on which their development was based isn’t valid. The Bayer researchers were drowning in bad studies, and it was to this, in part, that they attributed the mysteriously declining yields of drug pipelines. These were not studies published in fly-by-night oncology journals, but blockbuster research featured in Science, Nature, Cell, and the like. Looking at sixty-seven recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75 percent of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate. There’s an unspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to test it. But the problem isn’t just with psychology. Their findings made the news, and quickly became a club with which to bash the social sciences. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn’t.
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