After only reading the preface and first chapter of Rigor Mortis By Richards Harris, I was surprised by all the lies that hide behind scientists’ research. The biomedical research world isn’t as perfect and correct as many people thought it was. “It also turns out that that scientists have been taking shortcuts around methods they are suppose to use to avoid fooling themselves. The consequences are now haunting biomedical research.” (Pg 1) It really shocked me how many scientists are willing to publish wrong, uncompleted research to the public. About half of the preclinical research published by scientists is not trustworthy. “He went on to calculate that untrustworthy papers are produced at the cost of $28 billion a year.”(Pg 14) I have now realized that many people aren’t even aware about all the wrong information scientists have published.
People are spending more than $30 million a year to fund the National Institutes of Health. The average american household spends $900 to support studies done by scientists and on medical treatments. More than 70 percent of scientists who try to reproduce their experiment have failed. Research and studies done by scientists that cannot be backed up is the reason that the biomedical world is failing and slowing down the progress to advance in any medical treatments to cure stronger and more deadlier diseases, like cancer. Most scientists are not even aware on the little mistakes that they are doing. It is actually very common for scientists to mess up their research and experiments without noticing but the scientists who do publish wrong information do not speak about the problem their uncompleted research is causing. These failures are mostly educated guesses. I think that scientists need to stop publishing wrong information because it is outright fraud. They need to complete their research so they know that their experiment can be reproducible. Glenn Begley’s paper mostly focuses on how most experiments performed by scientists, even his could not be reproduced. “ Of course one way to measure rigor is to look at the first, fundamental step: testing whether individual studies can be reproduced.” (Pg 25) In an article done by stanford is states that scientists who commit fraud have patterns to how they write and lie about their data. Sometimes the lies in their data can be identified before it’s even published. By now you would think that these mistakes can easily be prevented. People need to become more aware of this problem and help stop it. By doing this it would save billions of dollars spent on the wrong research.