Many people think that most of what scientists have published is correct, but this is not the case. A Stanford University biologist found that many scientific studies** are wrong. Why is this happening?
To get the right results, scientists need to redo each other's experiments to see if they can get the same results. But usually, the same results are not obtained. Sometimes, it may be intentional on the part of the researcher;But more often than not, it's other reasons that lead to different outcomes, such as your assistant may be a sloppy person, or you may have picked a weird group of patients when testing the efficacy of a single-use drug.
Scientific research often goes wrong
Let's take a look at a few typical examples.
In 1998, the world-renowned medical journal The Lancet published a research article that immediately attracted attention. The article says that after children are vaccinated, they may experience a variety of frightening symptoms. The most striking of these is the triple vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella to cause autism. The article, written by British medical expert Andrew Wakefield, had a negative impact and caused an anti-vaxxer movement that continues to this day. But Wakefield's study was wrong, and since then, more than 20 studies have been conducted on the relationship between vaccines and autism, and there is no evidence of a link between them.
In 2001, Yale University psychologist John Bagh found that people who were exposed to words like "effort" or "gain" performed cognitive tasks better. In 2013, researchers repeated the experiment, which was unsuccessful.
In 2011, Daryl Behm, a psychologist at Cornell University, conducted nine experiments that seemed to show that people can have specific functions. Such breakthroughs certainly require rigorous, reproducible evidence. Unfortunately, in 2012, other researchers repeated one of these experiments three times, and the results showed no specificity, so Darryl Behm's experiment could not indicate the existence of a specific function.
Some studies have shown that if you control yourself to do something or not to do something, such as overcoming your own ** for sweets, then you will have results that are really like exercising – just like building muscle. And this workout can also make you feel tired. But a 2014 study could not replicate the phenomenon.
That's actually a good thing
So, is there any value in these false scientific studies?In fact, whether an experiment is right or wrong, there is value, and sometimes mistakes are more useful than correct.
We know that a new scientific discovery is first made through conjecture, and then needs to be constantly verified and questioned in order to obtain a real, scientific theory. In the process of repeated research, although some conclusions were falsified, scientific research has made a real development. For example, without the original geocentric theory, there would be no later heliocentric theory. Similarly, without phlogiston, there would be no modern chemical theory.
The most famous story in the history of science is that Einstein was confused by the problem of the expansion of the universe. After the publication of the general theory of relativity, his equation describes a universe that either expands or shrinks. But astronomers at the time told Einstein that the universe was actually very stable. So Einstein changed his equation and added a "cosmological constant" to explain why the universe existed stably.
Ten years later, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was indeed expanding, and decided that the changes Einstein had made were not necessary. So Einstein removed the "cosmological constant" from the equation and said that adding the "cosmological constant" was the "biggest mistake" he made in his life.
But this is premature, because recent discoveries about the properties of space and time, especially the proposals for dark matter and dark energy, suggest that a cosmological constant may indeed be needed in order to match the theory with the observations.
Not being taken seriously is more troublesome
But the real problem in the scientific community at the moment is not that scientists often make mistakes, but that when they are proven to be wrong, people are not very interested in it. This is the important problem that hinders the development of science.
First of all, for the science press, pointing out errors in scientific research results, like Wakefield's triple vaccine, will lead to the eventual retraction of autism. Journalists are more willing to write about exciting new discoveries than to sullenly report on a hypothesis being denied. This bias is also present in many scientific journals. Scientists strive to make exciting new discoveries because that's what scientific journals want most. You won't see the cover of Science or Nature saying "Oops, we got it wrong!".”
Second, scientists need to focus on new discoveries for the sake of funding or rewarding science, rather than focusing on discovering other people's mistakes. Again, scientists are reluctant to step on each other's toes and offend other peers because it could affect their careers.
For the sake of the healthy development of science, both the scientific community and the press should pay more attention to correcting and reporting errors in scientific research.