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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

It's very expensive (prohibitively so) to reproduce any substantial study. It also feels like there's a lot of potential downside and very little reward, since there's a presumption of correctness in published papers today. Further, wet lab protocols are subjective enough that I'd imagine most labs would ignore a negative result as having been performed incorrectly.

Where does the money for this come from? Are you expecting that labs will write this cost into their grants? Have you seen interest from grant agencies to then actually pay for this?

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> Further, wet lab protocols are subjective enough that I'd imagine most labs would ignore a negative result as having been performed incorrectly.

That kind of illustrates the usefulness of replication! If the effect is so finicky that it cannot even be replicated in another lab, in what sense is that result interesting, useful, - or even real?

I think you overestimate most biology labs. It's really easy to screw up a protocol in subtle ways. Often it took the original lab weeks of debugging to get it to work (yes, to get it to work, not to produce a false positive).

Things get more reliable as time goes on and methods become better understood, but the critical steps in most experiments are usually nontrivial to replicate in the beginning. Especially by CROs, which are notorious black boxes, incredibly expensive, and often just plain old unreliable.

Hi, this is Bilal from Science Exchange. We are in discussions with funding agencies and foundations to possibly gather increased financial support. We feel this initial launch will provide a proof-of-principle to gather support.

Currently though, we hope investigators will pay for the validation themselves. We believe it can provide a valuable service to those in small biotechs or those who want to commercialize their research, to improve the robustness of outcomes for potential licensing opportunities.

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