The Crisis of Unreliable Science: A Pharmacologist’s Call for Radical Reform
17 hours ago Charles Rotter
Each year, biomedical scientists pump out about 1 million new papers, but a troubling truth hides in plain sight: much of this work can’t be replicated. Far from a small glitch, this is a colossal crisis—squandering billions, eroding faith in science, and stalling genuine breakthroughs. In an interview with Chemical & Engineering News, pharmacologist Csaba Szabo, a professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, confronts this chaos head-on, previewing his recently published book, Unreliable. His verdict? The scientific system is fractured beyond repair, and Band-Aid fixes won’t cut it. Nothing short of a revolution will do.
Szabo’s journey into this quagmire began casually—over beers with colleagues in New York during a sabbatical. The question that kept surfacing was simple yet haunting: “Why is it that nobody can reproduce anybody else’s findings?” It’s a problem scientists have grumbled about for years, but Szabo decided to do something about it. The result is Unreliable, a deep dive into the causes of irreproducibility—ranging from hypercompetition and sloppy errors to statistical trickery and outright fraud. His conclusions are as sobering as they are provocative.
The Scale of the Problem
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/03/09/the-crisis-of-unreliable-science-a-pharmacologists-call-for-radical-reform/
