Humanity would understand very little about cancer, and be hard-pressed to find cures, without scientific research. But what if, when teams recreated each other’s research, they didn’t arrive at the same result?
That’s what the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology of the Center for Open Science is attempting to do — redo parts of 50 important cancer studies and compare their results. They released their first five replications today, and it turns out that not all of the data is matching up. At least once in every paper, a result reported as statistically significant (the way scientists calculate whether an effect is caused by more than chance alone) was not statistically significant in the replicated study. In two of the cases, the differences between the initial and replicated studies were even more striking, giving the Center for Open Science researchers cause for concern.
