What are the standards plant experiments should meet?
1. All experiments should include plants that receive no treatment or experience the normal situation. This is the control. The control is what you compare the test results against. Have you heard of the placebo effect? In biomedical studies of the effect of a new medicine, some volunteer patients receive the new test medication and others receive a placebo (something that looks and tastes like medication but is not). Say you are interested in the effect of a particular light on the rate of photosynthesis. As controls in your experimental design you would expose plants to white light (all colors combined) and complete dark (no light). The test plants would be exposed to particular colored light filters. Would it be a fair test of the effect of light, if the control plants were kept at room temperature and the test plants were kept in a heated room? A fair test is one that is not biased. The test treatment, exposure to different colored light, is the only factor that should vary in the
