October 29, 2012

Researchers in the Lab, Ready for Their Close-Up

The world's first video science journal aims to stop a major research problem: failure to reproduce experimental results

Researchers in the Lab, Ready for Their Close-Up 1

Brian Smith

Researchers can't replicate poorly described experiments, so Moshe Pritsker went to the videotape, starting the "Journal of Visualized Experiments."

By Josh Fischman

Moshe Pritsker was about 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, with North America ahead of his airplane and Europe receding, when he began seriously wondering why he was there.

The year was 2003, and Mr. Prit­s­ker, then a graduate student at Princeton University, had been to Scotland to learn how to grow stem cells. His adviser had asked him to reproduce a stem-cell experiment published in a prestigious journal. It didn't work. He tried again and failed again. So his adviser