In a time when science deniers cling to the results of a single study to dispute mainstream medical recommendations, justifying their use of a horse dewormer or an antimalarial drug instead of tested drugs to fight a pandemic, a new report might give them fodder for their online comments.

According to the Associated Press, scientists undertook the task of replicating fifty experiments written up in respected science journals like Cell, Science and Nature between 2010 and 2012.  The papers presented some of the more hopeful advances in oncology in the past 20 years, and those results were used to promote groundbreaking treatments for cancer patients. In 54% of the re-stagings, the scientists could not replicate the results of the originally described experiments.

The inability to duplicate results does not rule out eccentricities in the singular results from being effective in the fight against cancer; it means that the results were not as certain as initial reviews of the data presented. 

“The truth is we fool ourselves. Most of what we claim is novel or significant is no such thing,” said Dr. Vinay Prasad, a cancer doctor and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the project.  Prasad said the true harm of the experimenters’ claims is that they gave cancer patients a false hope that a cure was “just around the corner.”

“Progress in cancer is always slower than we hope,” he said.

The failure to recreate the experiments’ results does not mean treatments stemming from those experiments are not effective.  Scientists stress that no drug, treatment or procedure is based solely on one experiment.  But the study does demonstrate the need to verify results in the early states of experimentation before announcing results to the public.

“We start a clinical trial, or we spin up a startup company, or we trumpet to the world ‘We have a solution,’ before we’ve done the follow-on work to verify it,” study co-author Brian Nosek of the Center for Open Science said.