高清福利片

At the beginning of this year, Nobel Laureate Frances Arnold publicly retracted a paper published out of her research group. Others had repeated the science and found that the enzymes studied did not do quite what the paper had claimed. Upon inspection, some key data had been excluded by one of the scientists involved, so the published results were inaccurate.

This is by no means unheard of in research. What was interesting, though, was Arnold鈥檚 response. Standing up with a public acknowledgment when it was neither formally necessary nor socially expected.

You see, reproducibility is a pillar of the scientific method. To trust scientific results, we must be able to show that they are more than random fluctuations, flukes of whimsy - or products of biased data collection.

Good science is sort of like being in a healthy, mature relationship. Your partner or friend is consistent, you don鈥檛 pretend they鈥檙e more than they actually are, and your family and other friends mostly like them (or are at least open to the idea, if you give them enough time and evidence).

Irreproducibility is a serious problem, a crisis across a number of fields. It can be potentially quite damaging and embarrassing for researchers鈥攁nd the standard response is a quiet retraction. Arnold鈥檚 statement was not entirely聽revolutionary, but it was聽brave. Above all, it was an act of great science.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 nice, but why are you harping on about it?鈥�, I hear you say. This issue of Science Alliance takes you right up to the scientific front line. You walk along the cutting edge of research to get a taste of where we are and where we鈥檙e going.

As with all of our issues, you鈥檒l find that science is vibrant and dynamic and full of awesome creativity. I am struck by this every day as a chemistry research student, where I design ways for trapped ions鈥攍iterally, single ions of ytterbium held in place with electric fields鈥攖o be used to find solutions to chemical problems even the largest supercomputers cannot.

A mere flight of stairs away, other (very different!) chemists are running through hundreds of compounds in inspired searches for new聽听补苍诲听聽and enzyme mimics, and聽听补苍诲听. Just down the hall, they鈥檙e making聽聽and figuring out聽.

But science is more than just its content. You鈥檇 be forgiven for forgetting this, I think, as the more prominent discourse behaves as though scientific theories are fundamentally flimsy bits of thought wisping through the aether. Frances Arnold鈥檚 public statement was inadvertently emblematic of the more-ness of science鈥檚 cutting edge: the rigour, the communication, and the courage.

Sure, the scientific vanguard is abuzz with enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge and progress, and the content at these frontiers is genuinely mind-boggling, but what makes all this important鈥攚hat makes science聽science鈥攊s this relentless quest for reality, for validity, and for rigour. There鈥檚 nothing flimsy about it.