<![CDATA[Unreliable Biomedical Research]]>An American drug company, Amgen, that tried to replicate 53 landmark studies in cancer was able to reproduce the original results in only 6 cases—even though they worked with the original researchers!

That’s not all. Scientists at the pharmaceutical company Bayer were able to reproduce the published results in just a quarter of 67 studies!

How could things be so bad? The picture here shows two reasons:

If most interesting hypotheses are false, a lot of positive results will be ‘false positives’. Negative results may be more reliable. But few people publish negative results, so we miss out on those!

And then there’s wishful thinking, sloppiness and downright fraud. Read this Economist article for more on the problems—and how to fix them:

• Trouble at the lab, Economist, 18 October 2013.

That’s where I got the picture above.

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