TY - JOUR T1 - Editorial: Scientific Rigor or Rigor Mortis? JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0176-16.2016 VL - 3 IS - 4 SP - ENEURO.0176-16.2016 AU - Christophe Bernard Y1 - 2016/07/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/3/4/ENEURO.0176-16.2016.abstract N2 - A large number of editorials/articles have been published recently on scientific rigor, both in the general media and scientific press. eNeuro is joining this conversation with two commentaries, the first published today by Dr. Oswald Steward, University of California, Irvine, and the second to be published July 14 by Dr. Kate Button, University of Bath. The public, and more surprisingly scientists themselves, appear to be discussing scientific rigor as a novel problem. It is not. Issues of scientific rigor have always been there, from the first time humans tried to interpret the observations they were making by proposing conceptual frameworks and testing theories.Take, as an example, the fight between Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard in the nineteenth century on the mechanisms underlying fermentation. Claude Bernard, who defined the Scientific Method, claimed that fermentation could occur without the presence of microorganisms, in striking opposition to Pasteur’s theory. After Bernard’s death, Pasteur published a rebuttal of Bernard’s results, stating that Bernard had lacked scientific rigor when doing the experiments on fermentation.It is surprising that Claude Bernard could make fundamental errors of experimental design, because he had written about what the proper behavior of a scientist should be. In fact, what he wrote may be interpreted as the essence of scientific rigor: “The experimental method is nothing but bringing observation and experiment into operation in order to get access to scientific truth. Some use the results of observation and experiment to build theories that they no longer put to test. … Instead, one’s inferences are to be tested by new experiments. … However, this is not yet sufficient. Even when attempting to verify … ER -