A growing spate of controversies, retractions, and fraud cases highlight the susceptibility of modern biology to untruths. Despite an elaborate peer review system, issues such as data manipulation, lack of reproducibility, lack of predictive tests, and cherry-picking among numerous unreported data occur frequently and, in some fields, may be pervasive (e.g., 1, 2 and 3).
Some of these issues are further intensified by what is now a hallmark of modern biology, the use of high-throughput experimental techniques. A single nucleic acid sequencing run can generate billions of data points.
Following up such experiments with cycles of hypothesis generation and testing is critical to establish scientific truth but can be expensive and time-consuming. It is particularly tempting to skip the extra work if a massive initial data set can be cherry-picked into a publishable manuscript without the additional effort.
doi:10.1016/j.tibs.2014.08.005
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