The Problem of Irreproducible Bioscience Research

Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, writes about the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research from inside the discipline. The piece is clear-eyed about the structural causes — career incentives, publication pressures, statistical malpractice — and honest about how hard they are to fix. For product direction it is a cautionary companion to anyone building a culture of experimentation: bioscience discovered, at scale, that most of its published findings do not replicate, and the reasons are not primarily fraud but ordinary human incentives operating on large numbers of people. A useful humility check before announcing that your team has "proven" something with data. Read alongside Merton to see what the norms look like when they hold and what happens when they erode.