Interstellar, and the Bravery of Great Scientists

            A myriad of thoughts race through my brain moments after the end credits of Interstellar started rolling. Despite the movie being a little (maybe a lot) too ambitious, there were many interesting elements to explore in the dark hole that is my brain. Confusion abound, but one word stood out in the horizon – bravery (you’ll get the puns if you watched the movie).

            The courage that Cooper, Brand, and the other astronauts had. To venture into the unknown. This concept is no stranger to fans of science fiction. However, the concept is often described as a sense of wonder, that the sense of curiosity and wonder is the underlying drive behind the brave space explorers who dare to risk their life to explore new worlds. What stands out to me most about these story-lines, is the courage. And the faith. The faith that Cooper and Brand put into Professor Brand, the trust they had for his vision, despite it being built upon a lie.

These are movie characters, but we see this in real life space exploration. Only last year did tens of thousands of people sign up for a one-way trip to Mars. Most people think that these people must be crazy. They must not have much to live for on Earth, that they are so desperate for attention, or an escape, or fame and a name in the history books. However, when you read into these people’s stories, most of them appear to be very reasonable and rational people. Most of these people have loving families who support their decision. Some are couples that signed up together, knowing that there is an insurmountable chance that only one of them will be picked for the mission. Why are these seemingly rational, intelligent, people making these seemingly rash, irresponsible decisions?

Economists explain that people are inherently irrational. But are they? To us, the weather appears to be irrational (there is a 60% chance of rain my ass, weather-man). We know that the weather is rational though. We just don’t have all the data to make accurate predictions. If we had enough data and a super-super computer, we could predict the weather to nearly 100% accuracy. Yes, our understanding of the weather is already at this level, but our technology is lagging behind. Maybe humans are indeed rational, and we just don’t have enough understanding and ways to quantify our thoughts to predict our actions accurately. By definition, if we can summarize all of our thought patterns, even if they are “irrational” from an outsider perspective, they must be rational. When we do things at a given moment, we do think that we are making rational decisions. It is only after the fact, when we have more data (actual outcome of our actions, probably very negative outcomes that have caused us much pain), do we realize that the decisions were not rational.

What am I trying to get at? I think that we are all rational beings, it is that we do not have enough data, or ways to measure what has happened, to make accurate predictions, so we make seemingly irrational decisions. But this is bravery. It is venturing into the unknown, when there isn’t enough data yet to accurately predict what will be the outcome, putting faith (not “blind” faith, since nobody really does that) in other people and the data they have provided you. That is courage.

From this view of the universe, everyone has been, and will be, extremely brave at some point in their life. Every single person has put their faith into what someone else told them, and acted accordingly. We do this not only because we don’t have enough time to measure every single data point, but because we are inherently trusting beings. But trust requires bravery, because we have to believe that the person we trust has our best interests in mind, or at least share a common benefit from whatever they are trying to convince us to endeavor.

How does this relate to science? Or to molecular biology, my field of study? Well, some of the bravest people I know are scientists. They might not be brave in that they dare to explore black holes, or jump off a cliff, or fight a bear, but they are brave in that they give their life to exploring the unknown. They pour their intelligence, their time, their money, their everything, into something that nobody has a clue about. They put forth this incredible sacrifice because of the slight chance that they might become a faculty member, only to suffer even greater unknowns, long nights writing grants that will be denied, failed projects, failed graduate students? I think not. They put forth this incredible sacrifice because they put their faith in their mentor, their post-doc advisor, their Ph.D. mentor, their boss. They believe that their mentor has given them a project that will flourish and explain something about the universe that nobody has ever known, that will help others to understand the universe, to cure disease, to uncover the meaning of life. Their mentor in turn puts great faith into the ability and integrity of their student or post-doc, that they will be able to execute the experiments needed to uncover this great piece of knowledge no one has ever known.

Recently, my mentor, Oliver Rando, received a huge grant from the National Institute of Health, a Pioneer Award. $500,000 will be awarded to our lab each year for five years to explore the mechanism(s) of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance. These awards are rewarded to proposals with a high risk but high reward potential. Most of the grant stems from work done by Upasna Sharma, a post-doc in the lab. When she joined the lab, previous lab members have been working for years to uncover possible pathways of epigenetic information transfer, to no avail. The lab was well-funded but not greatly so. The lab was modest in size, and a focus on chromatin modifications. The mouse project looked promising, but with no clear direction. However, she put her faith on Ollie (that’s what we called our boss), and Ben (a previous post-doc), and Jeremy (a Ph.D. candidate who has been working on the project for 6 years), in the data they have generated, in the direction that Ollie envisioned for the project. She trusted these people. And she was extremely brave on taking on this project. In less than a year, her work has shown that tRNA fragments, a type of small-RNAs, appear to be transferred to sperm via exosomes during its maturation, and that these tRNA fragments might carry some sort of epigenetic message to the offspring, leading to higher expression of a set of genes important for placental formation, and thus may contribute to differential metabolic patterning in the offspring. I have to admit, I would not have been brave enough to take on the project if I was in her position. I would have said that she was being irrational. But look where her bravery has taken her, and taken me, and taken the lab. Ollie has received a huge grant directly from the data she has collected, and now the lab is expanding. We now have the resources and man-power to study everything related to this project. We are even buying our own deep-sequencing machine??!!!!?!?!!?!

To all the brave people in the world, I raise my glass to you. Your actions may seem irrational from an outsider’s perspective. They might prove to be bad decisions in the end (alternatively, is any decision ever a “bad” decision”?), but you made the decision. You dedicated your life to these decisions. You trusted someone, or many people at the same time, to make these decisions. You dared to venture into the unknown, knowing the risks that you would have to take, but you endured, and you came through the worm hole into the other side, and the other side, is oh so beautiful. That is bravery. That is love. That is what we are. We are scientists.

Clean and Jerk with Lauren Fisher

Is aerobic training better than resistance training for weight loss? Part II

Not surprisingly, aerobic training is more effective than resistance training for weight loss. However, caveats abound. Please read on…

From the literature review, it becomes clear to me two things. Exercise scientists should foster collaborations, agree on a common methodology to measure something, and combine efforts for recruitment to increase participant number. This would make the literature much less muddled and difficult to navigate.

Before I go deeper, however, I wanted to state my opinions.

First, I think exercise should not be for weight loss. I believe that exercise should be an integral part of everyone’s life. Our bodies were evolutionarily designed to walk for days (see controversial books written on this subject such as “Born to run”, great read by the way), we were not meant to sit around all day. Yes life requires us to sit around for hours before the computer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t spare one hour out of your day exercising (that’s 1/16 of your time awake, be honest and say you don’t spend more time on social media). It’s for your own health and longevity, sanity and happiness (yes it has been shown in gazillions of studies that exercise leads to these things, we shouldn’t need to argue this).

Second, you should eat healthier. I know I should, and I already eat better than you. Our bodies are not designed to ingest so much rich, processed, garbage. Eat nutritious food and begin to enjoy it. You will feel better about yourself and who you are.

Third, stop making excuses for yourself. If you truly want to be healthy do it today. Make plans and discipline yourself. I know plenty of extremely busy people who somehow work in time to exercise. My MSc mentor runs to work pushing his baby in front of him. My PhD mentor has a treadmill-desk in his office that he walks on all day, and he’s one of the most prolific scientists I’ve ever met. You know that everything that you treasure in your life, you’ve had to work your ass off for. Reward takes dedication and hard work. Don’t think that health is something else. Health requires discipline and hard work.

Now I feel better. Now let’s talk about how exercise science is done.

Aerobic vs. resistance training

Aerobic training (AT) is generally defined in the field as moderate intensity exercise (50-70% VO₂max) for at least 30 minutes, usually done on a treadmill, exercise bike, or ergometer (Howley et al. 1994). VO₂max, or maximum oxygen consumption/uptake, defines the aerobic physical fitness of a person (Howley et al. 1994; Ronnestad and Mujika2014). This test, if properly conducted, needs to involve a graded exercise test on a treadmill or cycle ergometer. Exercise intensity is gradually increased, while oxygen and carbon dioxide intake and output values are measured (yes you have heard of this test). However, this method is tedious and requires an expensive set-up. Therefore, estimates of VO₂max can also be made, but these are not accurate measurements. Most studies I reviewed used an estimation for simplicity, a potential source of error.

Resistance/strength training (RT) involves repeated muscular contraction generated against an external resistance (weights/bodyweight). The stimulus of resistance against muscle contractions cause perturbations in skeletal muscle tissue that directly leads to muscular growth (i.e., hypertrophy; Schoenfeld 2010), and increases in strength, endurance, and coordination (Stone et al. 1991). Measures of improvement post-RT thus usually involve tests of strength, endurance, and lean mass. Strength and endurance improvements can of course be accurately quantified. However, body composition (body fat%/lean mass) measurements can be inaccurate when using techniques such as skinfold measurement (using calipers to measurement thickness of skin folds in certain areas then plugging the measurement into a general equation, Jackson and Pollock 1978), depending on the technician, and can introduce error into studies. Underwater weighing, applying Archimedes’ principle of the different relative densities of fat and muscle in water, is thought to be the most accurate measurement of body composition (Wilmore 1969). However, this method is tedious, and have been replaced largely by new, relatively accurate, technologies such as the BOD POD, which is a chamber that one sits in while the volume of air and the weight of a person is measured (like underwater weighing).

Lack of large randomized trials with conclusive evidence

            A large body of evidence supports AT and RT as important regimes to follow for general health maintenance (ex. Cardiovascular health, insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance, VO2max, body composition, bone density etc., Donnelly et al. 2009). The purpose of my blog is not to list these studies and their results, but to critically analyze the body of evidence that supposedly supports these conclusions.

Most of studies I found addressing effects of AT/RT on weight loss look at either exercise regimes alone, most likely due to a lack of participants (usually 20-30 total participants in each study). With such a small number of participants, sampling error starts to become a problem.

Furthermore, the population chosen is not random (a major statistical no-no). Majority of studies had overweight/obese participants that were sedentary before the study. Conclusions drawn from this subset of people cannot be extrapolated to the general population. Just because overweight/obese people have high chances of heart disease doesn’t mean an average person does as well, same goes for weight loss resulting from a certain amount or type of exercise. Additionally, if you already carry around a large amount of excess weight (hence “overweight”), your body is more likely to lose this weight.

As with cooking roast beef, studies of the effects of AT and RT cannot agree about methodology. For RT, some studies incorporated 2 days of exercise per week (Chilibeck et al. 1997), some 5 days per week (Yarasheski et al. 1993). Total time for studies ranged from 2 to 20 weeks. Some studies called for strict diet or calorie maintenance, while others did not. The exercises done were very different, although most were done using machines, which is I think the least effective way to do resistance training for general populations. One does not simply compare results of studies that incorporate such different programs. Needless to say, results vary tremendously from study to study. Some report weight loss but some don’t. However, most report a significant increase in lean mass and strength (Chilibeck et al. 1987; Starom et al. 1989; Starom et al. 1994; Prabhakaran et al. 1999; Yarashaski et al. 1993).

On the AT side, study methods were just as inconsistent. Studies were done on ergs (Geliebter et al. 1997; Miller et al. 2002; Posner et al. 1992; van Aggel-Leijssen et al., 2001), treadmill (Raz et al. 1994; Lambers et al. 2008), at between 40-70% VO2max, with a weekly exercise time between 120-225 minutes (4X30minute sessions to 4X1hour sessions). Some studies lasted a year (Anderson et al. 1995; Irwin et al. 2003), while others lasted 8 weeks (Geliebter et al. 1997). Study participants were very different, but mostly involved sedentary overweight individuals.

Results were abysmal for randomized trials of AT on weight loss. Average weight loss for participants were not higher than 3kg (Abe et al. 1997), with most hovering around 1kg even though the program lasted 1 whole year (Anderssen et al. 1995)!!! Why did they only lose 1 kg? Because the programming sucked. Anderssen et al. 1995 called for 3X/week of exercise at 50-60% max heart rate for one hour. This kind of workout plan was routine in all the studies. How can these people lose weight if they are not working hard enough? Intensity = results. Importantly, Anderssen et al. 1995 also incorporated a group that went on a diet restriction plan and exercised. This group lost an astonishing 6kg!!!! I will discuss the importance of diet on weight loss below.

The most systematic study addressing the effects of AT vs. RT on weight loss is a study led by Dr. William Kraus from Duke University Medical Center (Steutz et al. 2011; Willis et al. 2011). The study, published in two papers (I hate when people split data into different papers by the way), was a large randomized trial of 196 overweight/obese sedentary men and women doing either AT, RT, or both AT and RT for 8 months. The effect of these three exercise regimes on metabolic parameters (Steutz et al. 2011) and general weight loss parameters (Willis et al. 2011) were tracked and analyzed. All groups lost a significant amount of weight (2kg for AT only, AT and RT, 0.7kg for RT only). Interestingly, the AT alone group had the best results in fat loss, VO2max and metabolic parameters such as liver density. The RT, as expected, had the largest improvements in strength and lean mass.

Surprisingly, people doing both AT and RT (and therefore exercising for twice as long) did not show better weight loss, improvements in metabolic parameters, or strength increase than either the AT or RT alone. This does not mean that people doing AT and RT did not improve their strength and lean mass more than the AT alone group. However, it did not seem, at least in these middle-aged overweight men and women, that doing twice as much exercise meant twice the results. The results were still amazing though: AT and RT men and women on average dropped body fat percentage by 2%! Particularly considering that none of these people were put on a strict diet plan!

Some weird/interesting things in this study:

Even though both studies looked at the same group of people, the number of participants reported in each paper was different. Whether this was due to data missing from certain people, or because the data from these people did not bode well for the researchers’ conclusions is unknown.

Most importantly, the AT and RT group did both exercise regimes back to back. People get tired, especially sedentary people. Tired people don’t exercise well, and the amount of effort you put into something is definitely correlated with results (I’m not citing anything here because this statement is both philosophical and factual, if you have a problem with it you must be crazy). Therefore, I believe that AT+RT did not lead to additive effects on the parameters tested because the people were too tired to give their 110% in their second consecutive workout. I would have asked the people to commit more days to the study so that they can do aerobic training one day and resistance the next. I believe that this would have led to much better results for the AT+RT group.

Basically I find it hard believing that if one works out twice as hard one does not get twice the results. Call me a romantic. Also, if the participants were on put on a well-planned diet, their results would have been incredible!

In addition to exercise, diet is key

The importance of a diet supplementing an exercise plan is demonstrated (I think conclusively) by a meta-analysis study by Miller et al. 1997. A meta-analysis tries to combine data from different studies and measure the overall effect of a given treatment, here diet vs exercise, or both combined. Although many pitfalls arise, more trustworthy patterns emerge as factors that might bias studies are averaged, and data points (subjects) increase.

Over the 700 studies looked at by Miller et al. (1997), only 33 people on average participated in each study (this includes all the different groups). Most studies were not randomized, meaning the experimenters could introduce bias by accident. Frighteningly, most studies did not even include a control group!! Miller et al. (1997) also found that the type of people that participated in these studies were different. Exercise studies involved people who were younger and less obese, or not at all. One can imagine that a person with more unneeded body weight can lose weight and fat easier.

Regardless, the main findings of Miller et al. (1997) were incredible, if not slightly surprising to me: while exercise alone led to significant weight loss (3 kilograms), diet led to more than 10 kilograms of weight loss!! Surprisingly, people who did both diet and exercise did not have more significant weight loss than people who just went on a diet. However, these people were better able to maintain the weight lost after one year. It appears that while the common knowledge that diet and exercise are both important for weight loss, the well-known saying that it’s 80% nutrition and 20% exercise may hold true for the purpose of weight loss in overweight/obese individuals.

            From my review of the literature, it appears that most generally well-known fitness advice has strong scientific support. Despite the shortcomings in most exercise science studies, the overwhelming evidence supports the fitness myth: aerobic exercise is better for weight loss than resistance training. So, stop eating the roast beef and make some chicken breast and salad instead. 

Also, I know you don’t want to just lose weight. You want to be healthy. To be healthy and strong, you should improve your strength and do some resistance training. Go get it ;)

In my next blog post, I will critically discuss studies addressing the question: what is the most effective diet for losing weight and keeping off the pounds?

References:

Critical fitness series – a critical look at the science behind popular fitness advice

We all have this person in our life – the health nut. He or she might be a certified personal trainer or just really addicted to exercise. However, these people have one thing in common that really ticks you off sometimes (or just annoys you slightly depending on how much you think they know what they’re talking about): they are always trying to tell you the best way to exercise and eat. Whenever this happens, which is quite often, that voice in your mind (or at least my mind) goes, “where is he/she getting this information? Is this actually true? Will this even work?” If the voice in your mind doesn’t say this or something along the lines of this, you will probably not be interested in this blog.

Chances are, the source of information for them is someone else, who heard it from someone else, and not from actual research. Chances are, that even if they did glimpse it from a study (and I emphasize glimpse), the study was not done in a manner that warrants the conclusions that were made. Chances are, you are a curious, intelligent person like me who just wants the best information out there about health and fitness. Sounds like you? Then follow this blog series, where I will critically assess the scientific literature behind popular fitness advice (if any exists at all). I will judge the body of research behind a claim using my scientific eye, and help you assess whether the claim is actually close to the truth, and the advice worth following. 

Popular fitness advice #1: Cardio is ineffective for weight-loss

            I’m starting my blog on this popular fitness myth that a lot of health nuts like to hand out. It was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend who loves cardio but hates weight-lifting. I realized that I have this conversation with people ALL the time! Usually, I hand out the advice I was given: weight-lifting along with cardio is most effective for weight-loss. (You probably realize by now that yes, I am a health nut to many people). I got this advice from the internet, probably one of the gazillion websites that give fitness advice. I also confirmed this with a personal trainer friend of mine (my health nut, yes it’s like a pyramid scheme, get used to it - this is the fitness industry folks). After diving into the literature though, I think the answer is not as clear-cut as it might seem. However, before we get deep into the science, we need to start from the basics.

            First, what is weight-loss? I think most people think of weight-loss simply as reducing the number on the scale. But I think most people would also like those lost numbers to be coming from dying fat cells. This is where it starts to get complicated.

In order for scientists to do science, we need to be able to measure something accurately and reproducibly. However, scientists are people, and people are naturally lazy, so we like to simplify problems (see my previous post for what can go wrong when people get REALLY lazy).

A given experiment usually goes something like this: an older professor or health professional got some money to do some work about a given topic (here weight-loss and exercise). He recruits a few young, bright, eager minds (could be undergraduates, graduate students and/or health professionals, sometimes even high-school students) to do the research. They write up a plan for the experiment. At least two groups will be involved: a control group and the treatment group. In this example, depending on how ambitious the professor is, the control group could be doing no exercise at all or their regular routine. The treatment group will receive a more rigorous exercise schedule to be followed. Then the professor tells the students to do the work. They recruit some people who want to lose weight. Initially, there might be a lot of volunteers or people interested. Some of these poor people will be put in a control group and not achieve the goals they wanted to achieve. These people might get mad and drop out. As the experiment continues, some people might not be following what they are supposed to do. Some people might get into some family issues and forget about their experiment, or simply drop out. As time progresses, more and more people drop out, and most people will not have followed the program to the level that the researchers would hope for. At last, the initially eager young minds become frustrated and bitter young minds. They might themselves quit, leaving the experiment in tatters. They might push through all the problems and finish up the research. However, for an experiment to be trustworthy (for us to believe that their conclusions are justified, that what they saw is real, that the same things will occur in real life again and again), many things need to happen. There needs to be enough difference in terms of the measurements made between the groups, and enough people in each group, for the statistical gods to bless us with a significant P-value (or “real”, although this point is also arguable). Since so many people have dropped out of the experiment, we can probably imagine that the results from this hypothetical experiment are not trustworthy.

As you can see, a lot of things can go wrong when doing science. Of course, everything could go smoothly and you get great results, but this rarely happens (Murphy’s law – everything that can go wrong, will). Luckily, scientists are not stupid. We try to circumvent these problems before they happen by designing experiments that avoid running into these types of issues. Most of the science done in the fitness field these days are done using high-tech machines to accurately measure athletic performance (ex. force output, activation of certain muscles/neural circuits) in a short time frame. This way you get definite and reproducible measurements quickly. However, you can’t measure weight-loss in a short time frame (unless you sit in the sauna for a few hours).

I digress. Now that I have dealt with the scientific sidebar, and you know what real science is like, we can deal with the question in mind. However, things continue to be complicated.

You know when you have a family dinner. Your mom and dad are cooking, and they have an argument over how to cook the roast. You dad read somewhere that straight 350F for 3 hours is the best, while your mom knows from experience that searing the meat first, then 300F for 4 hours leads to be most tender and juicy roast. The point is, people are very opinionated, and have very different ideas about how one should approach a problem. Well, scientists are also people, so they also like to approach the same question – here, what is the most effective way to lose weight – in very different ways. This makes assessing which experiment has the most definitive answer to the question much more difficult, because everyone wants to roast the beef at a different temperature. 

To be continued...

When science goes wrong, and what we can learn from it

            Cells develop in an embryo in a step wise manner, like children going into school and finally choosing a career. Initially, children may choose whatever career they want and potentially become any kind of person they want to be. As the environment changes over their lifetime, children evolve and eventually become the stubborn and narrow-minded adults they were destined to become. Jokes aside, cells from an embryo are also given signals by the environment to become the cells they were destined to become. Essentially all the cells in our body are made of a specific set of cells in a developing embryo called pluripotent stem cells – master cells capable of becoming any cell type in the body. Most of the cells in our body now are terminally differentiated cells, meaning they have already chosen their path and arrived at them, and will never be able to turn into another type of cell.

The generation of master pluripotent stem from normal cells that have already become specialized has recently sparked a revolution in the biomedical sciences. This technique, called induced pluripotent stem cells, discovered by a Japanese scientist Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and earning him a Nobel prize in 2012, holds incredible promise in the field. One could envision taking skin cells from a patient who needs an organ transplant, changing these skin cells to master pluripotent stem cells, then giving them signals to become cells that make up the organ that the patient needs, growing and transplanting the organ back into the patient – all with minor risk of rejection by the patient’s immune system. During normal transplants, organs from another person are usually rejected by the patient because the immune system can recognize the organ as foreign and attack it, whereas an organ made from cells of the patient will be much less likely to be recognized as foreign. The technique as originally described by Dr. Yamanaka requires the infection of cells by viruses carrying four master genes. Genes are packets of information encoding proteins that ultimately play a function in the cell. Essentially, these four genes, called the Yamanaka factors, drive the cell into an identity crisis, causing them to morph back into their infantile state. This technique, while effective, is difficult, tedious, and expensive. Moreover, the technique has been thought to be dangerous, since it requires infection of cells by old inactive viruses that can lead to other potentially deadly mutations (think malignant cancer) if injected back into a patient. Therefore, many researchers have since been attempting to discover a faster, more efficient, and less dangerous way of driving terminally differentiated cells into an identity crisis, with success stories few and far between.

Enter another group of Japanese scientists, who published a paper in Nature back in January claiming that these master cells can be made simply by putting normal terminal cells into a slightly acidic environment. This paper took the field by storm – people were incredulous that cells could by coaxed into an identity crisis simply by tripping them out with some acid (pun intended). Not surprisingly, slews of researchers in the field tried to reproduce master cells in their labs using this technique. Soon, rumors started spreading that the technique was irreproducible. The murmurs soon became a loud din in the field, and many questioned the legitimacy of the paper in public. Various independent groups with a goal of revealing false data in peer-reviewed journals found that two pictures of cells in the paper that are supposed to represent different cells are in fact identical pictures. Parts of the methods were also found to be plagiarized. The authors quickly apologized for these mistakes, and called them honest mistakes, but enough doubt was casted on the paper that the research center where most of the research was conducted – the Riken center in Japan – began an investigation. The investigation eventually revealed inadequacies in data management, record keeping and oversight. Data described as coming from different lines or strains of mice were in fact found to be from the same strain of mice, and more cases of replication of the same data was found. The lead author of the paper, Haruko Obokata, a young researcher whose career looked so bright a few months before, was charged with misconduct – a death sentence for her scientific career. She quickly lawyered up and vehemently denied any misconduct with intent, and appealed charges of her misconduct, but these charges were later reaffirmed by Riken. The prestigious journal Nature that published the paper found itself in a public relations nightmare, and finally decided to retract the paper earlier this month.

Backlash in the scientific community is widespread. Ironically, earlier in the year, Nature ran a series of articles about how they were taking steps to improve their peer review process. Many scientists believe that the big journals in the field – Nature, Science, and Cell – are so eager to publish the next big thing that they don’t invest enough time, man-power and level of scrutiny needed to truly peer-review and weed out the faulty science. A recent investigation into big landmark papers in the cancer field found that results from only 6 out of 53 papers were actually reproducible (1). Another paper looking at a wider array of studies found that only 20% of papers have results that are precisely reproducible (2). While most researchers believe that cases like the acid-bath stem cells, where researchers clearly falsified results on purpose in order to advance their own careers, are rare, honest mistakes still lead to irreproducible data that confound and waste months of other researchers’ lives, and millions of dollars of the tax-payers and donors’ money.

            So what can we learn from this debacle? A colleague of mine summarizes the problem well: “most of us know that 90% of the papers in Nature, Science, and Cell are bull****, so God help the graduate student who’s the first to reproduce the results of these papers.” While it is easy to say that we should all take responsibility for our work and take pride in producing excellent, reproducible research that will actually contribute to our knowledge of how the world works, real life problems like shrinking funding sources, pressure to advance in one’s career, and maybe just pride can lead one astray. Maybe what we can really learn from this is that pressure may break us all down into another lesser, or infantile state, although sometimes it might just be a bad case of an acid trip. 

If you would like to read more about this, follow this link:
http://www.nature.com/news/stap-retracted-1.15488
http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-method-faces-fresh-questions-1.14895

1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html#t1
2. http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/full/nrd3439-c1.html