Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

Also if you read on the history of mathematics, the various back and forth foundational issues raised by infinitesmals, Fourier series, proof by contradiction and the like are very interesting. Sure, it is possible for a modern mathematician to look at all that and say, They just didn't know how to do it, HERE you go. But over decades and centuries people were somehow successfully continuing to do math, even though they knew that something serious was wrong in their understanding.

Meaning that either there's another unaccounted variable(s) that controls the effect of A in B and C, meaning that we cannot conclude anything from the experiment.

Yes and no is not acceptable...

Notice they say they got help without the shaming part so the scientists were willing to participate, just not get listed.

I personally know scientists who have helped out with disproving their own findings, it's not uncommon.

Cell Signaling (and much of Biology) research is in its Alchemy phase. Now, alchemy often gets a bad rap as being completely worthless, snake-oil type stuff, but this was not the case at all. Rather, individuals were working on an area about which almost nothing was known, and (more importantly) for which the key central organizing laws were not yet revealed (for Alchemy: the atomic theory of matter and chemical bonding, for Cell Signaling: how individual proteins and small molecules interact). Furthermore, the goals were lofty and almost certainly unattainable (for Alchemy: turn base metals into gold, for Cell Signaling: cure cancer), driving people to do "rush" work. It's not that the results are completely invalid, or that the experiments are useless. It's just that everyone feels like they're so close to a solution (Alchemists were way off with Phlogiston, and I'll bet Cell Signaling researchers are similarly clueless as to what really matters) that no one takes the time to step back and synthesize the results in an attempt to understand the forest from the trees.

Cell Signaling will, eventually, have its Joseph Priestley, its Dmitri Mendeleev.

From experience, the fact that 89% of these "cancer research" papers are not reproducible almost definitely has less to do with fraudulent data and so much more to do with crazy complex experimental setups that end up probing a half-dozen experimental variables all at once (without the researchers even grasping that this is going on).

Yeah, publish or perish sucks, but what sucks more is the death of basic science research. The Alchemists eventually became Chemists because they refocused on core principles (atomic theory, bonding) and forgot about the lofty goals (turn lead into gold)...

...but try telling any politician that they should decrease cancer research funding and refocus on genetics, structural biology, and evolution research. I'd love to know how they respond.

Especially if only 11% of them are reproducible, they're only 89% invalid.

I'd go so far to say: If the reproducibility rate is 11%, you're not doing science, you're just pursuing funding.