The Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) today announced the winner of its #authenticate video competition to promote cell authentication in biomedical research is Michael Ge, from West Covina, California.

Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of talk about reproducibility problems in science — about published results that turn out to be false alarms. In fields like psychology, neuroscience, and cell biology, these errors can send scientists down unproductive paths, waste time and money, and pollute headlines with misleading claims. "But I get much more exercised about reproducibility problems in clinical genetics, because those have massive and real-time consequences for thousands of families," says MacArthur.

While experiments may be published even in a top scientific journal, other researchers who attempt to repeat the same experiments under the same conditions often find contradicting results. As a measure of this, a recent study attempted to reproduce psychology publications and successfully replicated only 39 out of 100 studies. It turns out that excluding sex in experimental design may have contributed to reproducibility issues. Furthermore, sex can also have a biological impact on our scientific understanding and influence how well early biological studies translate into advances in human medicine.

Experimental results that don’t hold up to replication have caused consternation among scientists for years, especially in the life and social sciences (SN: 1/24/15, p. 20). In 2015 several research groups examining the issue reported on the magnitude of the irreproducibility problem. The news was not good.

Project on Reproducibility and Robustness of the Empirical Instrumental Variables Literature in Medicine.

The finding that acute and chronic manipulations of the same neural circuit can produce different behavioural outcomes poses new questions about how best to analyse these circuits.