American taxpayers spend about $30 billion a year to support the National Institutes of Health. Most of that funding supports research at universities, at the boundary of medicine and biology. Unfortunately it appears that a great deal of that research is not robust, and can't be reproduced in other labs. Richard Harris took a year's leave from his job as science correspondent at National Public Radio to explore the reasons for these failings and to explore ways that the scientific enterprise can be improved. The result was his book, Rigor Mortis.