Errors in the Genetic Data of Oft-Cited Cancer Studies are Revealed

In 2016, a survey of hundreds of researchers suggested that many branches of science are facing a reproducibility crisis. While there is debate about the scope of the problem, many scientists agree that it’s an issue. There could be a variety of reasons for the problem. One aspect may involve errors in genetic sequences either in reference databases that all researchers use to verify the sequence of some portion of the genome, or RNA, for example. For example, in 2017, public databases of DNA sequences were found to carry higher-than-expected rates of…