An absolutely irreproducible conversation with Nicole Nelson

What happens when we can't reproduce our work- or someone else's? What does it mean about the science- and ourselves?

Today on the podcast, we're talking to Nicole C. Nelson,  an associate professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an affiliate of the Holtz Center of Sciences and Technology Studies.

Nicole's work examines scientist's assumptions about the natural world and how these assumptions shape scientific practice.  In her award-winning book, Model Behavior, she examines how animal behavior geneticists' beliefs about their systems shape the research with most models.

Her work has been applied to clinical practice in oncology, working with researchers as they applied novel genomic technologies to chemotherapy resistant cancers. She's currently studying  the scientific reproducibility crisis.

Here's a link to one of the studies on graduate students and their responses to irreproducibility that she describes in our conversation.

A complete transcript of the episode is available here.