Friendly reminder that the scientific world is being sodomized by the invisible hand of the market just as much as the rest of society.
"Reproducibility in science is not very sexy. Because our scientific culture generally rewards innovation over cautiousness, replicating a study conducted by others will not get a researcher a publication in a high-end journal, a splashy headline in a newspaper, or a large funding grant from the government. Only an estimated 0.15% of all published results are direct replications of previous studies."
sitn.hms.harvard.edu
"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field."
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
"Clinical trial data on new drugs is systematically withheld from doctors and patients, bringing into question many of the premises of the pharmaceutical industry—and the medicine we use"
"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."
thelancet.com
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
nybooks.com
"I can't tell you exactly what percentage of the trials are flawed, but I think the problem is far bigger than you imagine, and getting worse…it is so easy to manipulate data, conceal it or fabricate it…there is almost a code of silence not to speak about it."
www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/spiegel-interview-with-whistleblower-doctor-peter-wilmshurst-a-1052159.html
"More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research."
nature.com
"Hayes was first hired in 1997 by a company, which later became agribusiness giant Syngenta, to study their product, atrazine, a pesticide that is applied to more than half the corn crops in the United States, and widely used on golf courses and Christmas tree farms. When Hayes found results Syngenta did not expect — that atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs, and could cause the same problems for humans — it refused to allow him to publish his findings."
democracynow.org
"Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they’d downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government’s current dietary guidelines. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats—for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic."
"When a new drug gets tested, the results of the trials should be published for the rest of the medical world – except much of the time, negative or inconclusive findings go unreported, leaving doctors and researchers in the dark."
