ideasIdea
Funders set aside a fixed share of budget for independent replication
Almost no money is spent checking whether important cancer findings hold up. Setting aside a small fixed fraction of every research budget for replication would change that.
The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology attempted to replicate 50 high-impact papers and could complete only 23 experiments, with effect sizes on average 85% smaller than the originals. No funder has a standing replication budget. A rule that 3 to 5% of a funder's research budget goes to independent replication of findings selected by their translational importance, with results published regardless of direction, would create the missing feedback loop.
Hypothesis
Findings that pass funded replication will progress to clinical trials at a higher rate and fail in early clinical development less often than unreplicated findings, justifying the set-aside within five years.
Rationale
Replication is a public good that no individual lab is rewarded for producing; only funders can pay for it systematically.
What would test it
One large funder adopts the set-aside; track replication outcomes and downstream translational success against a matched unreplicated set.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
philanthropy
Cost to try
Large (over $50M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Preclinical results do not reproduce · Fewer than half of landmark cancer biology findings reproduce when someone else tries.
- Funding follows fashion, not burden · Money goes to the cancers and questions that are easy or popular, not the ones that kill most or where a dollar would do most.