【Guardian】Why scientists need to do more about res...

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As I thought and learned more about the experimental system we were using and the biological problem we were tackling, I started to wonder how on earth our friends across the campus could ever have expected to have got they result they had – and had published. The more I understood the system, the less I understood their result.

Finally, with Christmas approaching, our two labs had a joint meeting to share results and generally plan the next stage of our collaboration. By then I had some other promising lines of enquiry, but that original result still niggled – and eluded – me.

I showed a few gels at this meeting, sharing my frustration, and it was then that one of their senior postdocs said, “Oh yes, we had to do it about fourteen times before we got the result we wanted.”

I wasn’t entirely happy with that particular discovery. But frustrating as it was, at the time I didn’t think in terms of scientific misconduct. We couldn’t publish a paper saying “guys, this isn’t right”, and we certainly didn’t have the time, energy or indeed inclination to force a retraction. It was a minor result in a fairly small field, and there were other geese to cook. But that didn’t stop me being angry at the resources and time I’d wasted on a project that went nowhere ... for all the wrong reasons.

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