Repeatable or Not? Who is the Judge?
"A First Look at Reproducibility in Cancer Biology" -Derek Lowe's Blog
- Very insightful for the reproducibility, especially on Cancer Biology. Mostly target identification and therapeutic effects.
- Remind me other one topic NgAgo: also critically on reproducibility
- One more on STAP cells, with new info on patent arguments
- My points are:
- Who is the judge? In what kind of granularity/resolution/percentage of repeats? Peer-review maybe. but there are still arguments there.
- Complicated systems (i.e. human or even cells) are difficult to model ( hence systems biology and etc). It is like a Jenga game, picking out one piece might induce the collapse of the whole structure. Therefore, gone with the wind of reproducibility, or increase dramatically the difficulty to repeat the experiment.
- If so, any reproducibility is arbitrary for complicated systems, for different labs, with different technical dexterity, or at different times. We have to live with one criteria at a time and increase the resolution along the time.
NOTE: No, science is not voodoo. But still there are ambiguity in science.