Three reasons to distrust microarray results

From Reproducible Ideas:

Even when lab work and statistical analysis carried out perfectly, microarray experiment conclusions have a high probability of being incorrect for probabilistic reasons. Of course lab work and statistical analysis are not carried out perfectly. I went to a talk earlier this week that demonstrated reproducibility problems coming both from the wet lab and from the statistical analysis.

Continue the discussion here....

More like this

Most scientists I know get a chuckle out of the Journal of Irreproducible Results (JIR), a humor journal that often parodies scientific papers. Back in the day, we used to chuckle at articles like "Any Eye for an Eye for an Arm and a Leg: Applied Dysfunctional Measurement" and "A Double Blind…
For many years, I've been perfectly content to work with small numbers of things. Working with one gene or one protein is great. Even small groups of genes are okay. I'm fine with alternatively spliced genes with multiple transcripts, or multiple polymorphisms, or genes in multi-gene families, or…
About a week ago, I happened upon a number of stories about a study and project that demonstrates a key difference between science and pseudoscience. They had titles like, "Rigorous replication effort succeeds for just two of five cancer papers" (Science), "Cancer reproducibility project releases…
To understand a lot of statistical ideas, you need to know about probability. The two fields are inextricably entwined: sampled statistics works because of probabilistic properties of populations. I approach writing about probability with no small amount of trepidation. For some reason that I've…