Speaker : Raphaël Lévy, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and Université Paris Cité, France
The EPN Campus Colloquium will be held on Friday 11 September at 14:00 in the ESRF auditorium, and will be followed by a coffee break with the speaker at 15:00
The belief that science is self-correcting is consubstantial to the scientific enterprise. Yet, the careful reader of the scientific literature is confronted to a high proportion of uncorrected misconceptions, errors and fraud. Thus, the ERC Synergy project NanoBubbles asks the question of how, when and why does science fails to correct itself. In the context of this project, the NanoBubbles Reproducibility Initiative investigates the robustness of highly cited articles in nanobioscience. It starts from a paradox: hundreds of articles report the use of nanoparticles as efficient intracellular sensors of various cytosolic target (ions, mRNAs, etc). Yet, nanoparticles enter cells by endocytosis, a process that results in their confinement within intracellular vesicles, the endosomes, where they do not have access to the targets they are supposed to detect. As an attempt to solve that paradox, the replication initiative focuses on the most cited articles reporting intracellular sensing with nanoparticle probes. The presentation will introduce the NanoBubbles replication initiative, the open science approach that was adopted, the results and conclusions of the first replication and present an open call for contributions to this replication effort. The presentation will conclude with a general discussion on the (lack of?) reliability of the scientific literature and of the various approaches that could be used to improve it.
To register to the colloquium: https://forms.gle/MnBDyfiU33bZViP18
