It bears repeating: how scientists are addressing the 'reproducibility problem'

"Recently a friend of mine on Facebook posted a link whose headline quoted a scientist saying “Most cancer research is largely a fraud.” The quote is both out of context and many decades old. But its appearance still makes a strong point: the general public has a growing distrust of science and research.  Recent reports in the Washington Postand the Economist, among others, raise the concern that relatively few scientists' experimental findings can be replicated. This is worrying: replicating an experiment is a main foundation of the scientific method.  As scientists, we build on knowledge gained and published by others. We develop new experiments and questions based on the knowledge we gain from those published reports. If those papers are valid, our work is supported and knowledge advances ..."

On the other hand, if published research is not actually valid, if it can’t be replicated, it delivers only an incidental finding, not scientific knowledge. Any subsequent questions will either be wrong or flawed in important ways. Identifying which reports are invalid is critical to prevent wasting money and time pursuing an incorrect idea based on bad data. How can we know which findings to trust?  Why would a repeat fail?  Repeating a result is not always a simple task ..."