'Serious errors' in research linking deaths to red meat

If that was true there would not be any need to declare funding. Let's be real, everyone is funding their own agenda. If some scientist finds some effect that helps a corp or an activist group further their own mission, they get funding.

The finding might still be totally valid, but the visibility of the science and in particular the visibility of the science to the right people (legislators) can still be influenced by agenda driven entities.

So, the last 100 years of scientific research, then?

As long as science was done properly, the results are valid (even if the opinions on what those results mean may not be).

And if "not enough science was done" to rigorously investigate the entire landscape, that's not a failing of those doing the science. It's not their job to perform years-long work for nothing, so someone's going to have to pay for it, and academia has no money, independent research institutes only work on commission, and companies obviously only pay for studies they think will let them grow as a business. Especially in that last case, if the research does some funny stuff with the statistics (as is so often the case), that's on "us" (as in, the reviewers, publishers, and experts in the field) to call bullshit on, but "those who stand to gain pay for the research" has been driving research since before either of us was born.

The problem is that for any sufficiently complex or advanced research there are enough variables to contend with that there are 1000s of ways to get "no repeatable result" and only a few to actually replicate. Knowing which variables need to be controlled is part of the expertise, training, and lore. Knowing when those variables are getting out of control and how to fix them early (knowing which knob or often combination of knobs are required) is yet more expertise and experience. This is true in physics, chemistry, biology, and electronic design. Getting a null result really is often simply a failure to properly run the experiment... and as a scientist it would be very easy to follow any documented "recipe" and fail to get the proper result in hundreds of different ways. That does not make one a great scientist. You can't even tell me every way it could be screwed up. I can always come up with a new one!

Programming is such a wonderfully controlled environment, it's digital, replicable, and _almost_ math-like. You can know the variables. You can trivially replicate a program, or dig down into the OS... but every physical experiment out there has much more common and worse problems than Spectre or Rowhammer waiting to destroy it. It's the cosmic rays.

Your equipment/materials/specimens gets contaminated or reacts or ages. Your ultrapure water isn't. There's a vibration that changes everything. Your calibration sample changes. Cleaning staff used a new cleaner. The AC turned on. Build your experiment to be impervious to all of these and everything else I can't think of... or use the intelligence of an expert. Get there faster, cheaper, and find better ways of doing it along the way.

You'ld be right to say that it should all be documented, but the problem is that you basically need to be an expert to even understand the variables and to those experts many variables are so obvious to control they wouldn't think of doing otherwise. To give concrete and extremely valuable examples in manufacturing: EUV systems for lithography, OLED deposition and patterning, Lithium battery electrode forming. You can have the very best and exquisitely designed equipment for manufacture and yet without experienced experts running the process (replicating the experiment day in and day out) it will go out of control and you will get garbage in a million ways. It's like amateurs playing chess against a master... where the master is the natural variation of the environment.

High value semi manufacturing is a great example of how hard it is. The processes are designed to be as simple as possible to replicate. You replicate every day as many times as possible. You have huge amounts of money and resources to succeed and sometimes you still fail. Getting to 10% yield/replication is a big step... getting to 50% maybe harder... then 90%... and higher. Novel science is often harder and there's much less money and the time to replicate could be months/result rather than 1000s of testable results/min.

Wow, I can't think of anything practically wrong with this.

I can think of plenty of reasons why it won't happen (notably the downward pressure on the candidate pipeline, which for a variety of reasons isn't an outcome research institutions don't want), but I'm wondering if the best place to apply the pressure would be the accreditation institutions and the Department of Education.

> Every PhD student should, in order to obtain PhD, not only do his original research but reproduce another published result

Speaking for my own PhD (now around 25 years ago): it's hard enough getting one's own damned work to reproduce, never mind the work of a complete stranger.