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Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Wonder Why So Many People Mistrust Scientists?

I think it's news reports like this from Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.
During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"It was shocking," said Begley, now senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, which develops cancer drugs. "These are the studies the pharmaceutical industry relies on to identify new targets for drug development. But if you're going to place a $1 million or $2 million or $5 million bet on an observation, you need to be sure it's true. As we tried to reproduce these papers we became convinced you can't take anything at face value."
It is kinda scary, isn't it?  Maybe the severe problems with the global warming bad science aren't just political.  Maybe it reflects a larger problem?

3 comments:

  1. Three or so relevant things I've noticed:

    The more politicized the area, the less reliable the "science" is. You're old enough to remember Nixon's "War on Cancer" ... it's probably no coincidence the field over-focused on oncogenes which were discovered a year before. Science has always had problems with orthodoxy, they increase as the number of independently thinking funding sources decrease (here I'm talking especially on the scale of centuries) and this gets much worse if the field gets politicized.

    I've noticed that the closer biology research is to health and medical applications the worse it tends to be. I and you can imagine reasons why, but this is an empirical observation of mine that doesn't take into account the causes.

    Biological research is in some ways both harder than other fields (it's all so ... squishy) while the standards are lower than I observed in chemistry and physics. (Real physics, not the "earth science" sorts of things that include climate change ... you too are also old enough to remember when the big threat was global cooling and that too was all our fault.)

    Studies like these (and this is not the first one, although it sounds like the more rigorous one) continue to confirm my above impressions. I might also say that this sort of thing is one of many reasons I switched my major from biology to chemistry.

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  2. Heh, should have read the article before commenting.

    The over-focus on oncogenes is what the section headed by "BELIEVE IT OR NOT" on cancer drug targets is talking about; whatever the reasons, they've resulted in a lot less useful medicine than predicted. But they did consume the field and its funding for decades (they may still, I haven't checked in a long time).

    And while Phillip Sharp was my biology undergraduate faculty adviser, he was great and definitely not a reason I changed majors.

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  3. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, in PLoS Medicine.

    Do you read Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline? Lots of good stuff about pharmaceutical chemistry, from the business end to the down and dirty chemistry.

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