

Bloggers put chemical reactions through the replication mill - ananyob
http://www.nature.com/news/bloggers-put-chemical-reactions-through-the-replication-mill-1.12262

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james_ash
This is one of the distinctive features of organic chemistry as a science -
that once a procedure is published, the barrier for any competent chemist in a
well-stocked academic or industrial lab to attempt to replicate it is very
low. It can often be done in an afternoon. This stands in contrast to say,
cell biology, where the experimental feedback loop can be on the order of
months or years.

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timr
This is interesting, but these sorts of "reproducibility initiatives" also
kind of naive: there's a natural meta-review process in science, wherein
research generally isn't accepted until it has been reproduced and published
in different ways by multiple labs. In other words, peer-review of individual
papers is not the only sanity check (or even the most _important_ sanity
check).

That's not to say that these sorts of things aren't useful exercises, just
that it's pretty wishful thinking to argue that this sort of peer-replication
is going to make any sort of dent in the system. Scientists are a naturally
skeptical and conservative group of people, and one of the first lessons that
gets drilled into you in graduate school is that you have to take individual
papers with huge grains of salt.

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akiselev
[http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug_target.html)

The problem is that there is a lot of incentive to publish peer reviewed
articles and very little incentive to publish articles confirming another
paper. In my experience, the reproducibility of papers is tested in the worst
possible way: during the process of more novel research.

If we are to continue this exponential growth in technological and scientific
progress we need to set up a far more efficient way of reproducing the papers,
independently of ongoing novel research. This seems like a great way,
especially considering the benefit it will give to startups and other
companies that can allow new R&D to rely on papers that have been tested
outside of the peer review/slow meta-review process in science.

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timr
It depends on how you look it it: is it "more efficient" to spend the time and
energy independently reproducing every paper that comes down the pipe, or to
wait for researchers verify the work that actually matters?

I think this kind of thing is probably a well-intentioned pipe dream. You
can't predict which work is going to be important, so you can't predict, _a
priori_ , which work to verify. So you either have to verify all of it, or you
have to guess, or...you can just let people do what they do right now: verify
the work they care about.

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akiselev
Well for one they don't HAVE to reproduce every paper. They only have to
reproduce protocols proposed for these papers, and mostly you can stick to the
ones with obviously wide implications. If, for example, there was one group
who tested all of the methods for manufacturing graphene for efficiency and
repeatability, that would make work much easier for dozens if not hundreds of
labs around the world. Not to mention it would open up the way for startups,
who can rely on tested protocols, to begin industrial scale work with
graphene.

You can't predict which work would be important in general, yes, but when it
comes to identifying important protocols in organic chemistry and biology,
there is a lot more information on what is important and what is not. Most of
the time, in o. chem, protocols are incremental improvements over previous
protocols and it's very easy to figure out which of them are most often used.

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andrewflnr
Ring-shaped molecules of nitrogen and oxygen sound really cool, but what are
they actually useful for?

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james_ash
Ring shaped molecules _containing_ nitrogen and oxygen (as well as sulfur) are
called "heterocycles" and they are an extremely common building block of
pharmaceuticals. They are found in 8 of the top 10 best selling drugs in the
USA: Lipitor, Plavix, Nexium, Abilify, Seroquel, Singulair, Crestor, and
Cymbalta. Combined sales of these 8 pharmaceuticals were worth $43.2 billion
in 2011. [http://www.businessinsider.com/10-best-selling-
blockbuster-d...](http://www.businessinsider.com/10-best-selling-blockbuster-
drugs-2012-6?op=1)

So developing reliable reactions that build these molecules is, indeed, a
useful exercise.

