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From: eddy@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Sean Eddy)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.misc,sci.research
Subject: Re: Strange results in Nature article
Message-ID: <2300@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 27 Jul 88 16:37:31 GMT
References: <20850@beta.lanl.gov> <2444@cxsea.UUCP> <4520@ut-emx.UUCP>
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Reply-To: eddy@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Sean Eddy)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
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article <4520@ut-emx.UUCP> ethan@ut-emx.UUCP (Ethan Tecumseh Vishniac) writes:
>I see in today's newspaper that an investigation by Nature  discovered
>that there were at least two problems (fatal problems) with the
>laboratory protocol.  First, the experimenters knew at all times
>which solutions were which (i.e. control and experiment) and
>this is well known to produce biased results.  Second, the laboratory
>notebooks revealed a large number of cases that produced negative
>results but were not included in the statistics.  

If the first part is true, someone is in big trouble. The Nature
article describes an elaborate set of double (or triple, even?)
blind experiments involving multiple experimenters and coded tubes.

As for the second part, newspaper reporters may have a hard time
accepting the fact that experiments quite often fail for reasons
quite distinct from refutation of a hypothesis (for instance, the
grad student performing the experiment had one too many cups
of coffee that morning). Manipulation of a complex biological system
can be more art then science at times. The ability to reproduce
a positive result in biology can be much more telling than even
a series of inexplicable experimental failures.

(Not that I believe the result, you understand...)

- Sean Eddy
- Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology; U. of Colorado at Boulder
- eddy@boulder.colorado.EDU		!{hao,nbires}!boulder!eddy	
-
- "Just as the locusts, once they are through with a field, have simplified
-  it horribly, could we not say that this is also true of some of the
-  great generalizations of biology?"
-                       - biochemist Erwin Chargaff