Science and technology

The Rush to Repeat

When a small research group at a provincial university announced that it had observed a chemical reaction which, according to every textbook, should have been impossible, the response from the wider scientific community was a mixture of excitement and deep suspicion. No sooner had the paper appeared online [1] laboratories on three continents set about trying to reproduce the result, some of them working through the night and posting their progress on social media as they went. Within a fortnight, the consensus was that the original team had been misled by a contaminated sample. What is striking about the episode is not that an error was made – errors are an inevitable part of research – but the speed with which it was exposed. A generation ago, the same process might have taken years, and the original claim might have found its way into textbooks in the meantime.