Name: 科學是否可靠？ (Is Science Reliable?)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:20:16.000Z
Duration: 9 min 11 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

In 2012, a researcher named Glenn Begley published a commentary in the journal Nature.

He said that during his decade as the head of cancer research for Amgen -- an American

pharmaceutical company -- he’d tried to reproduce the results of 53 so-called “landmark”

But his team wasn’t able to replicate 47 out of those 53 studies. That means that /88

percent/ of these really important cancer studies couldn’t be reproduced.

Then, in August 2015, a psychologist named Brian Nosek published /another/ paper, this

Over the course of the previous three years, he said, he’d organized repeats of 100 psychological

97 of the original experiments had reported statistically significant results -- that

is, results that were most likely caused by variables in the experiment, and not some

But when his team tried to reproduce those results, they only got /36/ significant results

-- barely a third of what the original studies had found.

It seems like every few months, there’s some kind of news about problems with the

A lot of people -- both scientists and science enthusiasts -- are concerned.

Right now, the scientific publishing industry is going through what’s being called a Replication,

Researchers are repeating earlier studies, trying to reproduce the experiments as closely

One group might publish findings that look promising, and other groups might use those

results to develop their own experiments. But if the original study was wrong, that’s

a whole lot of time and money right down the drain.

In theory, these repeat studies should be finding the same results as the original experiments.

If a cancer drug worked in one study, and a separate group repeats that study under

the same conditions, the cancer drug should still work.

But that’s not what happened with Begley’s cancer studies. And researchers in other fields

They’re repeating earlier studies, and they aren’t getting the same results.

So why are these inaccurate results getting published in the first place?

Well, sometimes people really are just making things up, but that’s relatively rare.

Usually, it has to do with misleading research tools, the way a study is designed, or the

Take an example from the world of biomedicine.

Researchers who work with proteins will often use antibodies to help them with their research.

You might know antibodies as a part of your immune system that helps target outside invaders,

but in scientific research, antibodies can be used to target specific proteins.

And lately, there’s been a lot of evidence that these antibodies aren’t as reliable

Companies produce these antibodies so researchers can buy them, and they’ll say in their catalog

The problem is, those labels aren’t always right. And if researchers don’t check to

make sure that their antibody works the way it should, they can misinterpret their results.

One analysis, published in 2011 in a journal called Nature Structural & Molecular Biology,

tested 246 of these antibodies, each of which was said to only bind with one particular

But it turned out that about a quarter of them actually targeted more than one protein.

And four of /those/ … actually targeted the wrong kind of protein.

Researchers were using this stuff to detect proteins in their experiments, but the antibodies

could have been binding with a completely different materials -- creating false positives

That’s exactly what happened to researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

They wasted two years and half a million dollars using an antibody to look for a specific protein

that they thought might be connected to pancreatic cancer.

Then they figured out that the whole time, the antibody had actually been binding to

a /different/ cancer protein, and didn’t even target the protein they were looking

So the antibody-production industry is having some quality control problems, and it’s

Some companies have already taken steps to try and ensure quality -- one reviewed its

entire catalogue in 2014 and cut about a third of the antibodies it had been offering.

Now, researchers /could/ try testing the antibodies themselves, to make sure they only bind to

the protein they’re supposed to. But that’s like conducting a whole separate study before

they even get to start on the main project.

Most research groups don’t have the time or money to do that.

But now that scientists are aware of the issue, they can at least be more careful about where

Having accurate tools for research isn’t enough, though. Part of the reproducibility

crisis also has to do with how experiments are designed.

This can be a problem in all kinds of different fields, but it’s especially an issue for

psychology, where results often depend on human experience, which can be very subjective.

Experiments are supposed to be designed to control for as many external factors as possible,

so that you can tell if your experiment is actually what’s leading to the effect.

But in psychology, you can’t really control for all possible external factors. Too many

of them just have to do with the fact that humans are human.

One classic experiment, for example, showed that when when people had been exposed to

words related to aging, they walked more slowly.

Another research group tried to replicate that study and failed, but that doesn’t

necessarily prove or disprove the effect.

It’s possible that the replication study exposed the subjects to too /many/ aging-related

words, which might have ruined the subconscious effect.

Factors that weren’t directly related to the study could have also affected the results

-- like what color the room was, or the day of the week.

When such tiny differences can change the results of a study, it’s not too surprising

that when they reviewed those 100 psychology papers, Nosek’s research group was only

able to replicate 36 out of 97 successful studies.

But it also makes the results of the original studies pretty weak.

At the very least, being able to replicate a study can show the strength of its results,

so some scientists have been calling for more replication to be done -- in lots of fields,

Because it can just be hard to determine the strength of the results of psychological experiments.

The fact that journals are so selective about what they publish is another reason the results

A lot of the time, researchers are pressured to make their findings look as strong as possible.

When you publish papers, you get funding to do more research, and the more grant money