According to the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, who is linked to bioethics through his bioethicist brother Ezekiel Emanuel, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." In this case the crisis is the reproducibility of published results in the biological and medical sciences. According to a recent comment in Nature, "An unpublished 2015 survey by the American Society for Cell Biology found that more than two-thirds of respondents had on at least one occasion been unable to reproduce published results. Biomedical researchers from drug companies have reported that one-quarter or fewer of high-profile papers are reproducible."

Researchers tested the credibility of past investigations reaching the conclusion of a new study: scientific researches are not always reliable. Few of the past studies could be replicated showing that some researches are either too biased or too distinctive to make a statement in history.

A decade ago, John P.A. Ioannidis published a provocative and much-discussed paper arguing that most published research findings are false. It’s starting to look like he was right.

A study that sought to replicate 100 findings published in three prominent psychology journals has found that, across multiple criteria, independent researchers could replicate less than half of the original findings. In some cases this may call into question the validity of some scientific findings, but it may also point to the difficulty of conducting effective replications and achieving reproducible results.

When a cancer study is published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, the implication is the findings are robust, replicable, and point the way toward eventual treatments. Consequently, researchers scour their colleagues' work for clues about promising avenues to explore. Doctors pore over the pages, dreaming of new therapies coming down the pike. Which makes a new finding that nine out of 10 preclinical peer-reviewed cancer research studies cannot be replicated all the more shocking and discouraging.