Sharing is caring, except I don’t care -Leia P.

Chapter 7 went over a few things consisting of genome research, ALS, results from experiments not being able to be reproduced, and how many scientists believe that their very valuable research should not be shared with others. Even though they could potentially lead to a cure. “Simply increasing transparency could go a long way toward reducing the reproducibility problems that plague biomedical research” Pg 145-146. As I read this sentence I became curious on why reproducing results would be problem. I continued reading the chapter to find out that it was much more common than I thought. I was honesty surprised because why shouldn’t another scientist do the same experiment another scientist did, and not get the same results. This sprouted many questions in my head such as, what do researchers do when they thought they’ve found the solution to something but after someone else does the experiment and their previously successful finding get proven wrong?

This article here goes into more detail about how scientists being able to reproduce experiments is becoming less and less common. If researchers are constantly performing studies for certain things that are proven to be true, but are later on just to be proven false. How do we know what’s true or not about what’s going on in the world if scientist keep making mistakes.

I have never seen or heard anything about this in the news or talked about by adults or in my classes. If something like that was released to the public, I’m definitely sure that multiple people everywhere in the U.S or even the world, would be very upset. There would probably be people out there creating conspiracy theories saying the the government has been lying to us something. Could you imagine the panic if people found out that weeks before on the news was a new vaccine, was later tested to find that they could not produce the same previous results. People would most likely be very upset. How would we be able to know what’s true or not, I’ve always thought that whatever scientist discovered was fact but that fact they could be wrong makes me rethink everything. “Murphy was frustrated beyond belief to find that so many ALS researchers simply won’t share their data.” Pg 156. While trying to find treatment for ALS, researchers were asked for data they could contribute towards the research/ But for some reason there were people who frankly did not want. This apparently was common which I saw as very rude as selfish. How do scientist expect to change the world if they won’t even help solve the smallest problems first?