Summary: a team at Amgen discovers 47 of 53 "landmark" studies published in high-quality journals could not be reproduced. A team at Bayer did an internal review of programs they had initiated based on journal studies and found that less than a quarter of those findings could be reproduced.
Three very damning quotes:
"Some authors [of the journal articles] required the Amgen scientists sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from disclosing data at odds with the original findings."
"'We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,' said Begley. 'I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning.'"
"The problem goes beyond cancer. On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent."
Academics are pressured to produce publications, not to produce science, and their studies are not always rigorous (not blinded to experimenters, etc.). People with high integrity and ability do produce good science that gets published, but unfortunately that appears to be the minority, even in highly prestigious journals.
So I'm curious: how would you fix it?
One thing the article mentions that might improve things is every journal dedicating one complete issue a year to reproducing the most influential studies of the year. Another could be getting a consortium of pharmas (who try to reproduce studies all the time, because if you're going to successfully make drugs you need the thing to work) to publish their internal data for the benefit of all. Does something like that exist?
Genius seems to be getting a lot of hate here and I'm not sure why. The UI is certainly odd. To me, it feels like the design is trying so hard to be futuristic and "cool" that it trips over itself and loses some ease of use.
But come on, you can get over that, and to me this was the first use of Genius I've come across where I thought "Damn that was cool, I'll have to use this for more than the occasional lyric."
This was really cool to me because it provided an interactive forum for multiple relevant parties (Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen) to have a debate. I'll get over the funky UI for that content any day.
As other people have said, genetic information is powerful and scary to most folks. Most diseases have a host of genetic factors that also interplay with environmental factors, and the outcomes of these interactions are not rigorously understood. So 23andMe is a cool idea but may be overstepping the data.
Plus most people are not able to interpret what these genetic risks mean for them, so delivering the results directly (not through a doctor or preferably genetic counselor) is risky. People tend to think of genes as laws or rules, as guarantees, when really our genomes are complex if-then clauses (if this chemical hits this receptor transcribe that bit there). What if someone decides to get a double masectomy because of BRCA mutations? That's a traumatic, expensive procedure, and maybe riskier than the cancer risk; in any case, it's a decision that should be made with a medical professional.
Finally, 23andMe inexplicably flipped a big old bird to the FDA, their own regulatory agency, by NOT RESPONDING TO THE FDA FOR 6 MONTHS before the warning letter. That's just irresponsible and foolish.
Biotech has a crazy amount of regulation, but I think 23andMe deserved this one
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-...
Summary: a team at Amgen discovers 47 of 53 "landmark" studies published in high-quality journals could not be reproduced. A team at Bayer did an internal review of programs they had initiated based on journal studies and found that less than a quarter of those findings could be reproduced.
Three very damning quotes: "Some authors [of the journal articles] required the Amgen scientists sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from disclosing data at odds with the original findings."
"'We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,' said Begley. 'I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning.'"
"The problem goes beyond cancer. On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent."
Academics are pressured to produce publications, not to produce science, and their studies are not always rigorous (not blinded to experimenters, etc.). People with high integrity and ability do produce good science that gets published, but unfortunately that appears to be the minority, even in highly prestigious journals.
So I'm curious: how would you fix it?
One thing the article mentions that might improve things is every journal dedicating one complete issue a year to reproducing the most influential studies of the year. Another could be getting a consortium of pharmas (who try to reproduce studies all the time, because if you're going to successfully make drugs you need the thing to work) to publish their internal data for the benefit of all. Does something like that exist?