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SalHunter β Expt 2 - Separated at Birth
#science #biofilter
Published: 2016-06-18 09:12:12 +0000 UTC; Views: 1522; Favourites: 30; Downloads: 0
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Separated at birth- a replication studyWhich of these Biofilters are twins - mirror images separated after the first stage of production? Each Biofilter is identified by a number (1 to 3) and a letter (A to D). There are 4 sets of twins in this project β can you find them? For example, you might agree that Biofilters 1B and 3C are twins. You can write your answers in the comments section below.
Science relies on experimentation, and replication of experimental results is an important part of the scientific process. Recently, problems in studies relating to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases have been highlighted due to a lack of replication of basic laboratory science. This has lead to delays in identifying targets in disease processes and in translating findings from the laboratory to human treatments.
Twin studies are also important in science to test whether characteristics are related to genes or environmental factors or a complex mix of both.
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Comments: 20
Hey Sal... I'm late to this one... 
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Hey Immy, yes they are both on-going ... sample size still too small for realistic analysis 
And there was me thinking that everyone would just *love* to feel like a neuropathologist!
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I was thinking I could blog about it again?Β
Yeah, sometimes I think its hard to get people to do things that involve more than clicking once on something!
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That would be lovely Immy, thank you so much. I think that you are right in that interactions seem to have been reduced to one click ... but then I suppose that everyone is busy ...
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I have some supicions, but I doubt I'll do better than the others. So, technically speaking: no
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Ahhh but that is the point of the game. It would be great if you could tell me which ones you think they are, then your answer would enter into a data set and I could do some analysis!
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Alrighty then:
1B | 3C (yes, I agree)
2A | 3B (second guess: 2A | 3A)
1A | 4D
2B | 1D
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Thank you so much my friend for participating, I really appreciate it!
Your answers are so very close ... in fact that is officially the closest answer yet!
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Oooh close. Thanks so much for taking part!
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Hi Sal,
It's Steve Mead. Just joined this group to have a go at this, though I now wonder if I understand what "twins" means.
Looking forward to exploring this site more...
1B-3C
1A-3D
1C-2C
3A-3B
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Ooooh quite close! It is a strange thing isn't it when you know there are 4 sets of twins but can't find them!
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Oooh! Challenge accepted.Β
Okay, this is hard.Β
1B-3C
1A-3D
1A-2B
1D-2A
I don't know if I'm right, but I think that's partly the point of this test. 
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Yay! 
AmGen, a big US pharma company could only reproduce 6/53 high-ranking and well-cited articles relating to targets for cancer ... that is not good and means that there are significant problems in the way some science is done. They were justifiably a tad annoyed.
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Yay!
I really like how I'm learning as I do these! It really reflects on the issues of medicine and the science of it, and what we could do better about how some things are done. Why is there such a small reproductibility? Is it also a budget issue? I know, in terms of cancer, paediatric cancer doesn't have much funding and that's an issue because some tumours/cancers children get cannot be identified.
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Thank you so much for this wonderful comment! You've really hit on the reasons behind this project!
The reasons why are many and varied. Often, animal models aren't well characterised so we don't know how similar the exact biochemistry is to humans. This means that we may not identify the right biological targets for the development of treatments in humans. Other methodological reasons include poor characterisation of laboratory tools like antibodies so we think we're looking at one thing but actually we are detecting a whole range of things that we don't know about. Perhaps the biggest reason why there is so much failure is that we don't really know what we are doing yet. Biological systems are complex, self organising and can change their behaviour in response to external changes. Cell cultures are not normal cells ... and the contamination of many cancer experiments with HeLa mutants has been a massive and under-reported problem. The list of problems is extensive! If you want to find out more about how badly science is done there's a guy called Dr. John Ioannidis who has done a lot of work on this see journals.plos.org/plosmedicineβ¦
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No problem! (:
I agree with you. Bio-systems are really complex, that even though medical science has been around for a while, we're still going in blind on some areas we don't know about, or we think we know about. I know, for instance, neuroscience is a tricky one because it's a fairly young field of study. The brain is such a sophisticated organ, that we're still trying to figure out why exactly certain things happen and when it can happen (e.g: aneurysm). To add to that, like you said, animal and human models can be different or similar -- what we do right in one doesn't not always translate 100% in the other. Top it with the all the things that can go wrong to a human body that doesn't really happen to an animal.Β
I'm currently going through the journal, very intriguing read!Β
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