The vagaries of laboratory experiments

One usually likes to think that scientists know what they’re doing. Here’s something that might shake your confidence. In bio-medical research, scientists often use cell lines. These are in vitro cells, originally taken from a human or animal donor, which can be experimented on to help develop new drugs or treatments. The problem is that, according to one review, in ‘at least 5 per cent’ of studies, the scientists have totally mixed up where the cells came from. This means that in at least one in 20 studies that were sent off for peer review the scientists were completely confused about the most basic element of their research. They thought, for instance, they were doing research on lung cells when they actually had pancreatic ones. In more extreme cases, they’ve fooled themselves into thinking they’re looking at human cells when in fact they come from rats. No wonder that when other scientists come along later and try to repeat the experiments they can’t get the same results.

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Major efforts are now going into forcing scientists to prove the provenance of their cell lines – as well as their lab mice, whose genetic background makes a huge difference to results of experiments but whose origin is often just as unclear as the cell lines. These and the many other avoidable screw-ups by biomedical researchers are among the topics of Unreliable, a depressing tell-all book by the high-powered medical scientist Csaba Szabo. He has seen it all – papers sent to him for peer review that contain obvious fraud; his own research plagiarised and mysteriously republished in dodgy Indian journals; grant review sessions where top professors can’t agree which proposed studies are good or bad.