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Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets

Wide distribution of findings shows how analytical choices drive conclusions.

October 12, 2023

Nature

Anil Oza

"In a massive exercise to examine reproducibility, more than 200 biologists analysed the same sets of ecological data — and got widely divergent results. The first sweeping study1 of its kind in ecology demonstrates how much results in the field can vary, not because of differences in the environment, but because of scientists’ analytical choices.



“There can be a tendency to treat individual papers’ findings as definitive,” says Hannah Fraser, an ecology meta researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia and a co-author of the study. But the results show that “we really can’t be relying on any individual result or any individual study to tell us the whole story."

Co-developer of Cassava’s potential Alzheimer’s drug cited for ‘egregious misconduct’

City University of New York’s Hoau-Yan Wang couldn’t provide original data to refute allegations of image manipulation, university says

October 12, 2023

Science

Charles Piller

"Cassava Sciences, a biotech company whose work on the experimental Alzheimer’s drug simufilam has been heavily criticized and is the subject of ongoing federal probes, has suffered another blow. A much-anticipated investigation by the City University of New York has accused neuroscientist Hoau-Yan Wang, a CUNY faculty member and longtime Cassava collaborator, of scientific misconduct involving 20 research papers. Many provided key support for simufilam’s jump from the lab into clinical studies and, given the CUNY report, some scientists are now calling for the two ongoing trials to be suspended."