Institute For The Future

The Future of Finding Nothing

Systems Biology has begun to gain attention as one of several new life sciences aimed at fundamentally reshaping the ways we understand how humans function at a cellular level. But a recent project from the field--called the Negatome--offers up a simple but clever idea to advance not just their own field, but other research disciplines: A database of negative results aimed at improving the scientific process.

 

As Mental Indigestion describes it, the database offers a publicly available list of proteins that "are unlikely to be engaged in direct physical interaction." Browsing around the Negatome, it's pretty clear that the database is really aimed at a small subset of researchers looking at the ways that proteins interact. The specific goal, as explained at Mental Indigestion, is to help systems biologists filter out noise between interacting proteins--a major problem due to the number of interacting proteins in our bodies. The database can also be used to help researchers develop algorithms to analyze hypotheses.

 

And I think this latter point--using failed hypotheses and stray data--is a key lesson for research that should extend far beyond the world of systems biology. Ruling out possibilities is an inherently valuable activity. And just as importantly, as this New York Times piece from a few years ago notes, failing to publicly disclose that ruling out can actually have some dramatic consequences:

 

Historically, scientific journals have published only positive results -- data showing one thing connected to another (like smoking to cancer). As a rule, they didn't publish negative results (this drug didn't cure that disease). Medical journals began publishing negative results a few years ago, but social science didn't follow the trend. This is a problem. Not publishing negative results means that generations of researchers can waste time and money repeating the same studies and finding the same unpublishable results.

 

Then there's publication bias. If, for example, a study found that welfare states have more terrorism than nonwelfare states, it would probably get published. If eight studies didn't find a connection between welfare and terrorism, they probably wouldn't make it into print, because technically, they didn't find anything. So a survey of published literature might suggest that welfare and terrorism are linked, even though eight studies potentially proved otherwise. This could have serious implications.

 

 

In other words, publishing negative findings does a couple key things: It helps researchers avoid repeating unnecessary tests, and it helps insure the integrity of meta-analyses and ensure that we don't place too much weight in a stray false finding. A project like the negatome in other fields could certainly help with those problems.

 

But the Negatome seems to take the concept of publishing negative findings a step further by putting the information in one place for others to quickly and effectively use it to improve their own work. It's a very simple but powerful concept, and one that researchers from a much broader set of fields should look to exploit.