事件记录
面试官: We'll talk about irreproducibility in science, up next on 范围.
播音员: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs, 科学与研究秀在the Scope上播出.
面试官: 我正在和医生谈话. Tom Parks, Vice President for 研究 at the University of Utah.
科学中的不可重复性, these are scientific discoveries made by one group that can't be replicated by another. 最近围绕这个问题有很多讨论. Is this as big of a problem as people are making it out to be?
Dr. 公园: 我确实认为这是一个严重的问题. There has been developing literature over the past ten years that I've been aware of, 我想有些可能早在那之前就知道了, that there are major flaws in the way research in certain fields, particularly biomedical science and social behavioral science, that cause a lot of published results to not be replicable or sufficiently reliable.
面试官: 你觉得这个问题有多严重? 它是否普遍存在？?
Dr. 公园: Estimates are that as much as half or more of published research is not replicable, and a recent study estimated that $28 billion a year of federally-funded research is, 你可以说, 浪费在无法复制的研究上.
面试官: 这些数字都很大.
Dr. 公园: 这些数字都很大
面试官: And it could be undermining a trust in science by the general public, do you think?
Dr. 公园: 我知道它是. 我的意思是, one of the things that has surprised me is that I've been following this for ten years and yet I find that many scientists are not aware of this issue, yet there have been pretty prominent articles in general interest magazines like The Economist, 《大发娱乐》, 大西洋, The Wall Street Journal and so forth that have laid out these issues quite clearly. 所以很多受过教育的公众都知道这一点, 立法者意识到了这一点, 资助机构意识到了这一点, 期刊意识到了这一点, 但是许多执业科学家并没有意识到这个问题.
面试官: 我想这可能是一个促成因素.
Dr. 公园: 我想是的, 但我认为部分原因是, either people are not aware or they're in denial about it because the consequences for scientists of changing, 使研究更具可复制性是很重要的.
面试官: 是什么让大发娱乐走到这一步? 你认为有哪些原因?
Dr. 公园: 它们有很多. In method sections we don't provide enough information to make a study easily replicated. 大发娱乐不会大发娱乐提供所有的结果数据. We don't restrict ourselves to testing our priori hypotheses on an experiment where people often go in and look post hoc after the experiment is done and find significant effects, and the statistical power that is the sample size of many studies, a shockingly large number of studies have statistical power that is too low to reliably generate reliable results.
面试官: 所以有很多问题，很多原因.
Dr. 公园: Yes, and I should also mention that we don't publish negative results. 大发娱乐并没有登记每项研究. 我的意思是, we don't know how many studies have been done in a particular field because only the positive ones are ever published.
面试官: 不，你以前开过实验室. Were you ever in a position where you couldn't replicate someone else's results? Dr. 公园: I can't think of an example where we did that, but I think that is part of the problem. Individual investigators are rewarded for publishing new and original innovative findings and ideas, 重复以前的研究是没有奖励的. 这是可复制性的一个很大的问题.
面试官: 那么你认为大发娱乐怎样才能克服这个问题呢?
Dr. 公园: In clinical trials fields or the consequences of poor replicability or reliability have consequences for human patients. 他们在这方面取得了进展. Trials have to be registered so that people know when a trial is underway, and then federally-funded trials have to report all of their results, 不管是积极的还是消极的. I think journals are coming to expect more detailed methodology and eventually, 我相信, federally-funded research will be required to have all of the data posted online and made available to anyone who wants to reanalyze it or replicate it.
I think journals will begin requiring larger sample sizes, more statistical power in studies. There are other more subtle issues with the specifications of reagents and the consistency of reagents and analytical methods and so forth. There's a lot of contributors to poor replicability but I've mentioned the ones that I think are the most significant.
面试官: 这些都是彻底的改变. 我的意思是，你认为这些发生的可能性有多大?
Dr. 公园: We already see politicians on both left and right arguing with scientific evidence when it doesn't suit their ideological stance, and this will give them another way to argue against evidence that they don't like. 我认为是资助机构, 维持资金, will have to insist on some of the changes that I just mentioned, 我认为是期刊, they're the ones who are publishing research that can't be replicated and I think they will eventually put in higher standards for getting papers published.
面试官: Does knowing about this issue taint how you look at new research that's coming out? If there's some new exciting discovery on the cover of Nature, 你是不是有点半信半疑?
Dr. 公园: Many years ago a grizzled old senior scientist said in a talk I went to, “如果这是真的，那就不新鲜了, 如果是新的，那就不是真的," and at the time I thought that was a cynical old person's thing to say. 但这或多或少是我现在的立场. 正如许多人所说, cancer has been cured in mice thousands of times for every new therapy that gets to people. 我认为人们应该对此持怀疑态度
科学家天生就持怀疑态度. We haven't been sufficiently skeptical about our own work until now, but I think it's coming.
播音员: 有趣的, 信息丰富的, 而这一切都是为了更好的健康, 大发娱乐是Scope健康科学广播.