Institut Charles Sadron Event

It is a common experience for a scientist reading a publication to disagree with the conclusions, to find errors, or more rarely, to discover features that are suggestive of scientific misconduct. It is also not uncommon to work for months or years on the basis of a publication only to find out that the results were not reproducible. It is often said that science is self-correcting but in practice there are many barriers to the correction of science. Furthermore, lack of, or delayed, correction has many negative consequences, e.g., on trust in science, waste of funding, patients’ safety, research careers, etc. The speaker will summarise the difficulties he encountered in some of his attempts at correction of science in the field of bionanoscience [1, 2] and introduce the ongoing interdisciplinary project ERC Synergy NanoBubbles [3] that aims to better understand how, when and why does science fail to correct itself, using the field of bionanosciences as one that we both study and contribute to.