reflections

Growing up as a kid, science class was taught based on the facts that we have gained throughout historical records. Did Sir Isaac Newton record study after study and write the about his laws of motion to describe the effects of gravity and momentum? Yes, that is a fact. Did Galileo Galilei become the first person to openly challenge the Catholic Church and state that the sun is truly the center of our solar system not the Earth? Yes, that is a fact. These were revolutionary ideas in their respective eras and the only way that people were able to determine these ideas as fact was through numerous replications of their experiments by different people all across the globe.

Every scientist wants their research to go down in the history books and to set the standards for their respective fields like what Newton and Galileo did for their fields. This burning passion though skews some lines about the number of times experiments should be replicated before being published. Some people pump out data too quickly so not all of the possible issues have been troubleshot yet, so other scientists might doubt the validity of the results. This means that science actually takes a really, really long time before anything can even be presented to the scientific community.

Some researchers are willing to even go to extraordinary measures like faking their lab results just so they can be published have five minutes of fame and glory. The only problem is that in science they have systems to catch these frauds. People have designated jobs to repeat people’s scientific experiments in order to prove their validity. It’s fairly easy to catch them too because after a few people talk and agree that the results are not replicable the publication is tainted. This is the worst thing that can happen to scientist; once your reputation is tainted it’s nearly impossible to ever recover. Not only is your reputation important, but also whoever your scientific mentor is really impacts how much faith people put into your findings.

The REU program had a really extensive discussion one of the first weeks over the importance of producing truthful, replicable results. The biggest example that was hammered home was the effects of one graduate student at a Japanese university that produced some truly revolutionary research. Nobody could reproduce this data. People investigated further and further and found that the images that this researcher had published were actually the combination of two totally different samples that were doctored together. There was outrage in the scientific community. The woman had her PhD revoked by her university and her entire lab’s careers were tarnished and they were scoffed at for being associated with the fraud. The woman and her co-author were both so ashamed by the backlash that they both committed suicide shorty after.

Not only does the number of times that tests have to be run hinder the scientific process, but the number of safety regulations that have been implemented recently has really slowed things down. Before, scientists would test on animals and even humans freely without too many restrictions, now for any similar testing any proposed experiments have to be reviewed by an entire board at the university. The whole process has turned science into a much safer endeavor for the patients involved as well as the environment. However, the drawbacks are slowing down the timeline for potential products and drugs that could protect the world and save thousands of lives. Think about how far you would go; how many rules would you bend to make your mark on science and save the world?

-Grant Ashby, Georgia Tech