
Cancer reproducibility project scales back ambitions - nonbel
http://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-scales-back-ambitions-1.18938
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nonbel
In case anyone was curious about this part:

>"Critics have dismissed the cancer-study endeavour as time-consuming, out-of-
touch with the realities of basic science and unlikely to produce
interpretable results. “It’s a naÏveté that by simply embracing this ethic,
which sounds eminently reasonable, that one can clean out the Augean stables
of science,” says Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead
Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

[http://retractionwatch.com/2015/07/06/cancer-research-
retrac...](http://retractionwatch.com/2015/07/06/cancer-research-retraction-
is-fifth-for-robert-weinberg-fourth-for-his-former-student/)

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danieltillett
Sad that the only reason they have had to scale back is a lack of funding. As
someone as former insider this work is needed more than ever.

~~~
nonbel
I actually found more detail was published over the summer.[1] It sounds like
getting the necessary information for the replications was surprisingly
difficult and this drained the funds. Also, people are leaving the project
because they deem the papers too flawed to be worth replicating. This makes it
sound like it's turning into a fiasco. Universities putting up legal obstacles
to replications, etc:

"Early on, Begley, who had raised some of the initial objections about
irreproducible papers, became disenchanted. He says some of the papers chosen
have such serious flaws, such as a lack of appropriate controls, that
attempting to replicate them is “a complete waste of time.” He stepped down
from the project's advisory board last year.

Amassing all the information needed to replicate an experiment and even figure
out how many animals to use proved “more complex and time-consuming than we
ever imagined,” Iorns says. Principal investigators had to dig up notebooks
and raw data files and track down long-gone postdocs and graduate students,
and the project became mired in working out material transfer agreements with
universities to share plasmids, cell lines, and mice.

[...]

ALTHOUGH ERRINGTON SAYS many labs have been “excited” and happy to
participate, that is not what Science learned in interviews with about one-
fourth of the principal investigators on the 50 papers. Many say the project
has been a significant intrusion on their lab's time—typically 20, 30, or more
emails over many months and the equivalent of up to 2 weeks of full-time work
by a graduate student to fill in protocol details and get information from
collaborators. Errington concedes that a few groups have balked and stopped
communicating, at least temporarily." [1]
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1411](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1411)

