Experiments may have a certain amount of randomness that can’t be eliminated.
Over the last decade or so, the science community has been concerned about what has been called the “reproducibility crisis”: the apparent failure of some significant experiments to produce the same results when they’re repeated. That failure has led to many suggestions about what might be done to improve matters, but we still don’t fully understand why experiments are failing to reproduce results.
One area of the reproducibility crisis is our failure to reproduce the work of honest and conscientious animal researchers. We have struggled to understand the cause of the problem and what we can do to fix it. Unfairly, it might cause questions to be raised about the work of the scientists concerned. These problems are of particular concern when the work relates to the development and testing of new treatments and other medical work. This interesting item raises an issue that might change our thinking. The problem isn’t in the project design, or the conduct of the researchers, it is due to the variability of mice and how they respond to testing agents.
Try and try again
The basic outline of the work is pretty simple: Get three labs to perform the same set of 10 standard behavioral experiments on mice. But the researchers took a number of additional steps to allow a detailed look at the underlying factors that might drive variation in experimental results. The experiments were done on two different mouse strains, both of which had been inbred for many generations, limiting genetic variability. All the mice were ordered from the same company. They were housed in identical conditions and were tested while they were the same age.
Each of the three labs did two repetitions of the experiment. In one, all the work was done by a single individual to cut down on the influence of differences in how the mice were handled. In the second, three different people did the experiments to add some variability.
