It worked as it was supposed to...eventually. Instead of double-checking the initial results, hundreds of research papers by many research teams looked into questions that would be very important, if the genes in question were connected to depression.
Sure, it is great that it's not (quite) religious dogma, and it eventually gets revisited. But, a couple decades worth of work and ~1000 research papers, many of which took place AFTER the earlier 2005 paper that called into question the link to depression, is by no means what we should shoot for.
More fundamentally, there was nothing in the system that motivated anyone to do replication of the original link. The problem is not that the original link turned out to be spurious, and it's not that anyone did anything unethical. More worrisomely, nobody appears to have done anything unethical, but because of the systemic incentives for research grants, tenure, etc., replication of the foundational result wasn't attempted in a serious enough way until many times that much work had been done on something spurious.
Sure, it is great that it's not (quite) religious dogma, and it eventually gets revisited. But, a couple decades worth of work and ~1000 research papers, many of which took place AFTER the earlier 2005 paper that called into question the link to depression, is by no means what we should shoot for.
More fundamentally, there was nothing in the system that motivated anyone to do replication of the original link. The problem is not that the original link turned out to be spurious, and it's not that anyone did anything unethical. More worrisomely, nobody appears to have done anything unethical, but because of the systemic incentives for research grants, tenure, etc., replication of the foundational result wasn't attempted in a serious enough way until many times that much work had been done on something spurious.