Scientific claims require replicability and rigorous scepticism before acceptance — discuss with reference to historical instances of contested scientific findings such as the 1976 Viking Labeled Release experiment.

Article 51A(h) makes developing a "scientific temper... and the spirit of inquiry and reform" a fundamental duty [4]. That temper rests on two pillars: a finding must be reproducible by independent hands, and must survive deliberate attempts to refute it. NASA's 1976 Viking Labeled Release (LR) result remains the classic illustration.

The Viking episode: a positive signal that could not be closed

• Viking 1 and 2 carried three parallel biology experiments — Labeled Release, Pyrolytic Release and Gas Exchange — precisely so that no single instrument could decide the question [1].
• LR moistened Martian soil with nutrients tagged with radioactive carbon-14 and watched for labelled CO₂ — a signature of metabolism [2].
• The signal appeared. But the built-in control — heat-sterilising a duplicate sample — and the divergent readings of the other two experiments left the result inconclusive rather than confirmed [1].

Why replicability and scepticism are indispensable

• Alternative explanations must be exhausted: later missions found perchlorates in Martian soil, an oxidising chemistry that can mimic metabolic activity, weakening the biological reading [3].
• Controls and cross-checks distinguish signal from artefact; a lone positive is a hypothesis, not a discovery.
• Cautious communication protects credibility — NASA reported "increased chances", never "life found", and that restraint has aged well.

The other side: scepticism must not harden into dismissal

• The LR principal investigator contested the consensus for decades, and reanalyses have kept the debate open — a reminder that doubt should provoke better experiments, not closure of inquiry [1].
• Excessive caution risks discarding genuine anomalies; the corrective is more replication, as with sample-return and successive missions.

Scientific certainty is thus earned incrementally, through repetition, controls and contested review rather than a single dramatic reading. India's own Mars Orbiter Mission (2013), with its multi-payload design, embodies the same discipline [5]. Institutionalising replication, open data and peer scrutiny is how a society converts curiosity into dependable knowledge — the constitutional promise of scientific temper in practice.