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Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity
Researchers are rewarded for splashy findings, not for double-checking accuracy. So many scientists looking for cures to diseases have been building on ideas that aren’t even true.
by Michael Hiltzik
In today’s world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you’d think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.
You’d be wrong. Many billions of dollars’ worth of wrong.
A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.
The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn’t be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.
But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.
“Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research,” observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen’s head of global cancer research, “this was a shocking result.”
Source: http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2014/08/science-has-lost-its-way-at-a-big-cost-to-humanity/
