So Science...Might Have Gotten It Wrong. Now What?
Last week, I wrote about a scientific paper that was published in the elite journal Nature in 1995. Within a couple of years, the findings of said paper were called into question by several other papers in different journals. As of today, nearly two decades since the original came out, nobody has replicated it. And yet, it’s still sitting there in the literature, still influencing others. It’s been cited nearly 1,000 times.
Some readers were angry with my post, arguing, for example, that “science’s self-correcting paradigm works over decades”. Indeed, that was my point. Science’s self-correction is generally very slow — perhaps, as many argue, too slow.
This week I learned about an unfolding scientific debate that’s got me thinking again about the challenge — the impossibility? — of swift and sure scientific correction. What does it mean when one group of researchers, or even two or three groups, can’t replicate a particular scientific finding? Does that necessarily mean it’s wrong? At what point should a scientist give up on a new idea for lack of supporting evidence?
That unfolding debate started in late 2011, when Chen-Yu Zhang’s team from Nanjing University in China found something pretty wild: bits of rice RNA floating in the bloodstreams of Chinese men and women. That might not seem so strange; rice was a primary ingredient of their diets, after all. But RNA molecules are pretty fragile. So the discovery shocked and intrigued many biologists.
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