Why Can't I Reproduce Their Results?
There&#x27;s certainly a kernel of truth to this.<p>I worked in a cancer lab as an undergrad. New PI had just come over to the school. He had us working on a protocol he&#x27;d developed in his last lab to culture a specific type of glandular tissue in a specific way.<p>I and two other students spent months trying to recreate his results, at his behest. When we couldn&#x27;t get it to work, he&#x27;d shrug and say some shit like &quot;keep plugging away at the variables,&quot; or &quot;you didn&#x27;t pipette it right.&quot; I don&#x27;t even know what the fuck the second one means.<p>Then an experienced grad student joined the lab. He spent, I don&#x27;t know, a week at it? and was successfully reproducing the culture.<p>I still don&#x27;t know how he did it. I just know that he wasn&#x27;t carrying a magic wand, and the PI certainly wasn&#x27;t perpetrating a fraud <i>against himself</i>. It was just, I guess, experience and skill.