Replicating Experiments Is Not Wasteful!

I disagree with Senator Flake. The Flake list of wasteful government spending includes:

On the list, we find $1 million that went to the National Institutes of Health to study a dozen monkeys running in hamster balls on a treadmill. That's right. But as strange as the spending may seem to us taxpayers, it's not unique. The report states, "In a case of monkey-see, monkey-do, the National Institute on Aging is already spending more than $600,000 to conduct its own monkey on a treadmill study."

Replicating studies is not a waste of money. Maybe it should be privatized (we cannot trust the government to check its own results), but it is not a waste.

If scientists had paid more attention to the need to replicate studies, the stem-cell bubble of a decade ago could not have happened.