Yachtie
Posts: 3593
Joined: 1/18/2012 Status: offline
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Science is to be trusted. It's self-regulating, self-correcting, and subject to peer review. This is what we here at P&R are constantly told by those who self-declare themselves to be keepers of the truth and the way. The non-skeptics of proclaimed science. "faulty fundamental research" is corrected via peer review and the scientific method. All would be well in the world if only the skeptics would STFU, and stop standing in the way of science. 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." Unfortunately, it wasn't unique. A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany similarly found that only 25% of published papers on which it was basing R&D projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which the firm had sunk huge resources should be abandoned. Whole fields of research, including some in which patients were already participating in clinical trials, are based on science that hasn't been, and possibly can't be, validated. "The thing that should scare people is that so many of these important published studies turn out to be wrong when they're investigated further," says Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Economist recently estimated spending on biomedical R&D in industrialized countries at $59 billion a year. That's how much could be at risk from faulty fundamental research.
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“We all know it’s going to end badly, but in the meantime we can make some money.” - Jim Cramer, CNBC “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” - George Orwell
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