Unbiased Research

By: Christopher

The problem with science is everyone is biased when conducting experiments. This is not some ground breaking point I'm making in this post - everyone knows this fact. If you're studying breast cancer, you have an idea of how breast cancer works before you even run your experiment. Then, regardless of what results you obtain, you always view them in the light of your initial bias. Or even worse, you set up your experiment with your result already in mind, and do not allow for other possibilities. The degree to which this affects science varies depending on the scientist, but it is always present. In fact there are very few experiments that are truly unbiased.

If you want to study breast cancer, you use cells from breast cancer patients for your experiments. The way science works is you use "Cell Lines," which are just cells that you can grow in the lab. So let's say if you want to study breast cancer, you use a cell line called "MDA-MB-435." That's just some annoying letters that let you and everyone else know that you are studying breast cancer.

I came across a paper last semester which uncovered decades of truly unbiased research (accidentally). The thrust of the paper was saying that MDA-MB-435 cells, which everyone believed to be breast cancer cells, were not actually breast cancer cells. Since 1982, people have been reporting findings on breast cancer that are completely false because they were using these cells.

Even though the main point of this paper was to discredit all the breast cancer research that had been done using MDA-MB-435 cells, the authors made another interesting point: MDA-MB-435 cells are actually skin cancer cells. This means that all the research done with these cells on breast cancer can now be viewed in the light of skin cancer.

What I find most interesting is now we have a vast encyclopedia of skin cancer research that is as unbiased as you can get. The researchers in no way were intending to study skin cancer when they published their results. Admittedly, the researchers still had a biased (thinking they were working with breast cancer), but a falsely based bias is almost as good as no bias. Since their experiments were not set up in the context of understanding skin cancer they did not have any preconceived notion of how skin cancer works when they planned their protocols. We can now re-examine their data and apply it to skin cancer. There will still be a bias in the interpretation of data, but the data collection is completely untainted.

If you read science papers, scientists are always trying to justify why their experiments are unbiased. Maybe the only way to do unbiased research is on accident.