I couldn’t find one guy putting Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. There are no videos of giddy college students decorating a drunk roommate. And no one wants to scream in defense of the wounded pop diva and tell us to “leave Britney alone.”

 

We’re not in YouTube land anymore, Toto.

 

Welcome to the Journal of Visualized Experiments or JoVE.com, a very sober website. Though on its face it may evoke thoughts of a variety of websites where users post video, JoVE is more than geek chic for the lab set. The website, which features researchers demonstrating actual experiments on video, is meant to address what JoVE founder Moshe Pritsker argues is a significant problem for both academic and industry researchers that sucks time and energy into a “a systemic black hole.”

 

Pritsker said the idea of JoVE emerged from his own frustrations from trying for months to reproduce experiments—detailed in journal publications—that had been performed years and years before. The idea for JoVE came to him while working on as a post doc at Harvard Medical School in neuroscience lab.

“The problem that scientist run into everyday is lack of reproducibility of biological experiments,” he said. “If you have done an experiment in your laboratory and describe it in a reputable scientific literature, I’m supposed to reproduce it relatively easy.”

 

In reality, Pritsker said that’s not the case in biology. Typically, he said, scientists read a materials and methods section of a study and can spend months struggling to reproduce the results. The reason, he said, is that scientific experiments are complex and it is impossible to reflect all the small details in text. Often, what details are there, are misinterpreted.

 

“It’s similar to cooking. When you try to reproduce a Chinese dish from a written recipe, what’s the chance the dish you cook will taste the same as the one cooked in Shanghai? The first time, very little,” he said. “What you will do is repeat it again and again and again until you reach that authentic taste you tried to do.”

 

Launched at the end of 2006 with just six videos and $1.5 million in angel capital, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based JoVE is a for-profit endeavor. It is free to view the website, which is advertising supported. Pritsker said about 1,000 people come on to the site each day and it has 70,000 page views a month.