It was in 2004 that Moshe Pritsker, then working toward a doctorate in molecular biologist at Princeton University, tried and failed to replicate an experiment from a medical journal that outlined a way to grow embryonic stem cells.
For Pritsker, like for thousands of other researchers who routinely try and reproduce scientific experiments they read in journals, the experience was not uncommon. No one in his lab could perform the experiment, either, which would have been the first step toward putting the science to practical use.
'If you're lucky, you reproduce it. But the problem is, this doesn't work nine of 10 times. Everybody knows it,' he said.
The usual remedy is to seek help from another scientist who is familiar with the technique, or else travel to the original scientists to conducted the experiment and watch them. In Pritsker's case, he ended up traveling to Edinborough to meet with the authors of the study. It was on the way back that he began thinking of a better way around the problem.
In 2006, Pritsker founded what he says is the world's first-ever peer-reviewed online video scientific journal in Cambridge. The Journal of Visualized Experiments, or JoVE, has as its mission 'to increase the productivity of scientific research.' It's Pritsker's answer to a problem that has been cited increasingly in recent years. A Dec. 2, 2011 Wall Street Journal article headlined, 'Scientists' Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results,' describes how researchers at the drug firm Amgen tried in 2009 to reproduce a method of killing tumors described in a scientific journal for six months before giving up. 'I was disappointed but not surprised,' then vice president of research at Amgen, Glenn Begley, told the Journal. 'More often than not, we are unable to reproduce findings.'
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