Untracked variables, not fraud, drive the scientific reproducibility crisis
DJ Kleinbaum · DJ Kleinbaum · Jul 15, 2017 · at 9:38
DJ Kleinbaum, co-founder of Emerald Cloud Lab, explains why cellular and molecular biology experiments frequently fail to reproduce across different laboratory environments.
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“Maybe a tiny fraction of that might be malfeasance, but most scientists are trying really hard to, like, convey the results they have gotten and how they got them. The problem is, is that when you're doing that, when you're doing everything by hand, and you're just writing down the parameters that you think are important to the experiment, you're bound to miss something, or to just not take into account, like, what the humidity in the room is, or what temperature it is when this reaction is running.”
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