Abstract
Most graduate curricula in biological sciences offer courses that cover various scientific disciplines, but they give relatively little formal instruction in experimental design. Students learn the latter primarily through hands-on experience in the laboratory, and some find this learning process bewildering and frustrating. So, what is the root of the problem, and how can young researchers get experiments to work more predictably and reproducibly?
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Acknowledgements
I thank S. Miller (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland), R. Behringer (The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas), F. Watt (London Research Institute, ICRF) and many of my colleagues and students at New York University (NYU) Medical School for critically reading the manuscript. This article is based on the Borden Lecture that I delivered during the 2003 Joint Annual Meeting of the British Societies of Cell Biology and Developmental Biology. The lecture is also a part of a graduate course that I teach, entitled 'Scientific methods: survival skills for young biomedical researchers', which covers experimental design (discussed in this article), critical analysis of scientific literature, scientific writing, oral presentation and scientific integrity. The course has been a requirement for all first-year graduate students of the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at NYU Medical School since 2001.
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Sun, TT. Excessive trust in authorities and its influence on experimental design. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 5, 577–581 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm1429
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm1429
