Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

In 2005, a Stanford medical professor, John Unidis, published an essay titled, Why Most Published

Research Findings Are False, where he showed that the results of many medical

research studies could not be replicated by other researchers. This is obviously a problem. A subsequent

survey by the Science Journal, Nature, showed that more than 70% of researchers have tried and

failed to reproduce another scientist's

experiments. Not only that, but more than half admit to having failed to reproduce their own

experiments. During a decade as Head of Global Cancer Research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified

53 landmark publications, papers in top journals

from reputable labs for his team to reproduce. He sought to double-check the findings before

trying to build on them for drug development. He found that 47 of the 53 could not be replicated, causing huge problems for

those trying to produce new medicines based upon the findings. So what might be causing this problem?

Well, partway through his project to reproduce these landmark cancer studies,

Begley met with the lead scientist of one of the

problematic studies. He told the scientist that he had gone through the paper line by line,

figure by figure, and redid the experiment 50 times and never got the published result. The

scientist told him that they'd done the experiment six times, got the published result. The scientists told him that they'd done the experiment six times,

got the published result once, and put it in the paper because it made the best story. Such

selective publication is just one reason that the scientific literature is peppered with incorrect

results. Many blame the hyper-competitive academic

environment as research compete for diminishing funding. The surest ticket to getting a grant

or a good job is getting published in a high-profile journal, and this can lead a scientist

...