You may remember the post I wrote on Feb 3 about the group of Japanese researchers who turned somatic cells into stem cells by treating them with acid. It turns out that the RIKEN Center is conducting an investigation on this study because subsequent trials have proved inconclusive in recreating the data.
(Sorry for the link dumping there, but all of the links were related to that one sentence.)
As someone who has gone through many labs in school, I fully understand not being able to recreate the results of a study. Especially in middle and high school, carelessness or other mistakes are usually the culprit, but even correctly measured and conducted experiments flop; sometimes I'm convinced they don't work just to spite you. I've even been in at least one lab in which everyone's experiments flopped for no reason. However, it's unlikely that so many that are professionally done would have come up with inconclusive results.
One of the tenets of research is that it's replicable, and this not-so-good track record is a little troubling. Did they leave out part of the procedure? Were there different measurements? Was there an issue of translation? I imagine these are all things that the RIKEN Center will look into, but the crowdsourcing aspect could also help rule this out. I'm going to avoid a cooking analogy here because I don't really want to associate food with test-tube mice, but the scientists checking this out on their own could pretty easily tweak different material amounts or types to see if the changes produce something worth while.
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