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A long journey to reproducible results

Nature volume 548, pages 387–388 (2017)Cite this article

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Replicating our work took four years and 100,000 worms but brought surprising discoveries, explain Gordon J. Lithgow, Monica Driscoll and Patrick Phillips.

About 15 years ago, one of us (G.J.L.) got an uncomfortable phone call from a colleague and collaborator. After nearly a year of frustrating experiments, this colleague was about to publish a paper1 chronicling his team's inability to reproduce the results of our high-profile paper2 in a mainstream journal. Our study was the first to show clearly that a drug-like molecule could extend an animal's lifespan. We had found over and over again that the treatment lengthened the life of a roundworm by as much as 67%. Numerous phone calls and e-mails failed to identify why this apparently simple experiment produced different results between the labs. Then another lab failed to replicate our study. Despite more experiments and additional publications, we couldn't work out why the labs were getting different lifespan results. To this day, we still don't know.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. a geneticist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, California, USA

    Gordon J. Lithgow

  2. a developmental biologist at Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, USA

    Monica Driscoll

  3. an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Oregon, Eugene, USA

    Patrick Phillips

Authors
  1. Gordon J. Lithgow
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  2. Monica Driscoll
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  3. Patrick Phillips
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gordon J. Lithgow.

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Lithgow, G., Driscoll, M. & Phillips, P. A long journey to reproducible results. Nature 548, 387–388 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/548387a

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