Microbiologist Ferric Fang of the University of Washington, Seattle, questions whether it is possible to extrapolate from a few previous studies on reproducibility and conclude that 50% of preclinical research can't be reproduced.
That result has never been reproduced.
However, 2 years ago, Stephens and colleagues found that more than 95% of all the configurations that C. elegans ever assumes can be reproduced with combinations of just four eigenworms.
The results, reported in tomorrow's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, surprised researchers, who are discouraging people from loading up on the supplement until the results are reproduced in other people.
The main reason the 6-year project became a "real nightmare," says TIGR's Malcolm Gardner, is that Plasmodium's DNA is unstable when it's reproduced in bacteria--a necessary step before the actual sequencing--and is difficult to sequence.
In one of Harvard's hallowed halls last week, the seventh "First" Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony honored 10 individuals or research teams for achievements that "cannot or should not be reproduced".
Two other papers from the institute, which had originally appeared in Nature and PNAS in 1997, were retracted last year by most of their authors after their findings also could not be reproduced.
Fish from high-predation environments also reproduced for longer periods than did guppies from low-predation regions, again contradicting the conventional view, the researchers report in the 28 October issue of Nature.
Reproduced at higher frequencies, this bending would mean that infrared waves--of interest to the telecommunications world--could turn through 90 degrees in about a micrometer, 1000 times tighter than anything possible using optical fibers.
But under all current models, shorter RNA molecules, having less material to copy, would have reproduced faster, favoring the evolution of primitive organisms over complex ones.
Females with only one functional copy reproduced normally, but their babies died of starvation within 2 weeks of birth.
