Leonard P. Freedman

Abstract

Twenty-eight billion dollars. It’s a shocking amount of money, almost as much as the annual budget of the National Institutes of Health. But it’s how much a recent estimate suggests the U.S. science enterprise is spending each year on preclinical medical research that cannot be reproduced. Irreproducibility is not just a problem because money is misspent on research results that can’t be trusted, explains Leonard P. Freedman, president of the Global Biological Standards Institute, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the use of standards and best practices in research. It also delays the development of potential treatments and adds to already soaring drug development costs. Despite its importance, “nobody had really put a dollar figure on it,” Freedman says. So he and his coauthors estimated those costs in a paper published in June. They also tried to pinpoint the causes of the reproducibility problem and propose solutions (PLOS Biol. 2015, ...