Most Preclinical Life Science Research Is Irreproducible Bunk
...The scientific journal Nature published a disturbing commentary claiming that in the area of preclinical research—which involves experiments done on rodents or cells in petri dishes with the goal of identifying possible targets for new treatments in people—independent researchers doing the same experiment cannot get the same result as reported in the scientific literature.

The commentary was written by former vice president for oncology research at the pharmaceutical company Amgen Glenn Begley and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center researcher Lee Ellis. They explain that researchers at Amgen tried to confirm academic research findings from published scientific studies in search of new targets for cancer therapeutics. Over 10 years, Amgen researchers could reproduce the results from only six out of 53 landmark papers. Begley and Ellis call this a “shocking result." It is....