As the article states:
This is one of medicine's dirty secrets: Most results, including those
that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can't be reproduced....
Reproducibility is the foundation of all modern research, the
standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. In the U.S. alone,
biomedical research is a $100-billion-year enterprise. So when published
medical findings can't be validated by others, there are major
consequences. Drug manufacturers rely heavily on early-stage academic research and
can waste millions of dollars on products if the original results are
later shown to be unreliable. Patients may enroll in clinical trials
based on conflicting data, and sometimes see no benefits or suffer
harmful side effects.
Thus the issue of peer review being the sine qua non is somewhat baseless. One can assume the best of intents on the part of the researchers but in the final count the work all too often fails in the most critical step of scientific discovery, repeatability. Furthermore the works seem rarely to be retracted.
The piece continues:
In September, Bayer published a study describing how it had halted
nearly two-thirds of its early drug target projects because in-house
experiments failed to match claims made in the literature.
The German pharmaceutical company says that none of the claims it
attempted to validate were in papers that had been retracted or were
suspected of being flawed. Yet, even the data in the most prestigious
journals couldn't be confirmed, Bayer said.
One thus wonders if it would be better to demonstrate repeatability in the presentation of the results. All too often there is a race to publish without a care of the result having the ability of standing the most critical of tests. One experiment, with results, may have limited value.
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