If it’s good, translational science — that is, science that makes the jump from the lab into the clinic — can have a real impact on saving patient lives. If it’s bad, millions of research dollars can be wasted pursuing phantom treatments that should have ended up on the science scrapheap.
As a researcher in biology, immunology, virology and cancer, I’ve spent the last 13 years working at the lab bench and in the clinic. Now, I’m working on collecting and critically analyzing published research studies to make sure that the best drugs and treatments get licensed for patients.
Perhaps most shockingly, 83 per cent of studies failed to include any basic internal checks: positive controls (which are designed to work every time), negative controls (which are designed to fail every time) and experimental repeats (which are designed to make sure the results are real). These are the most basic building blocks of scientific research. Every researcher gets drilled to include these when they start out in science. The fact that these are being missed so often — not just by the scientists themselves, but by the peer reviewers who comb through their papers before they’re published — is a truly alarming trend.