Don’t add fuel to the anti-science fire
Others and I have talked about the lack of publishing negative results. That’s a problem and I agree that bias is a problem. However, Sarewitz’s example of mouse models as an example of bias is horrible and to me disingenuous. There is no question that mouse models aren’t directly related to humans. There are a ton of reasons to use mouse models first. If you look at the FDA requirements for drugs you have to use at least one large species before moving on to human trials. No one expects to get direct data from mice that you can translate to the clinic. However, there are ethical, technical, and economic reasons to do the majority of the basic research using mouse models.
In the commentary by Sarewitz, he mentions the Begley “article” (see below) as evidence that “ironically” industry gets it right. Wrong, here’s my personal example where industry got it wrong and people died.
Here’s my commentary on the Begley commentary.
I’m sick of these commentaries that fan the fire of science is bad. I wish there was a “-1” button.
via Misha Belle
Originally shared by mary Zeman
this is a fantastic essay about bias, and the problems we are seeing now in cause-effect/ correlation-causation type assertions in the literature. worth a read.
“Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed on the usual suspects — inadequate funding, misconduct, political interference, an illiterate public. Their cause is bias, and the threat they pose goes to the heart of research.
Bias is an inescapable element of research, especially in fields such as biomedicine that strive to isolate cause–effect relations in complex systems in which relevant variables and phenomena can never be fully identified or characterized. Yet if biases were random, then multiple studies ought to converge on truth. Evidence is mounting that biases are not random. A Comment in Nature in March reported that researchers at Amgen were able to confirm the results of only six of 53 ‘landmark studies’ in preclinical cancer research (C. G. Begley & L. M. Ellis Nature 483, 531–533; 2012). For more than a decade, and with increasing frequency, scientists and journalists have pointed out similar problems.”
http://www.nature.com/news/beware-the-creeping-cracks-of-bias-1.10600
May 11, 2012
You should never believe everything you hear or read, without investigating for yourself. BTW, there’s a difference between knowing and believing. Belief really has not place in science. Taking your own advice, don’t blindly believe either Sarewitz’s or Begley’s commentaries. In case it wasn’t abundantly clear, these are commentaries not scientific articles where you have a hypothesis, statistics, and peer review.
May 11, 2012
Really, Elle Gray ? I didn’t get that from your post. Maybe I didn’t read it carefully. In both of my “rebuttals” to the Sarewitz and Begley commentaries linked above, I give specific examples why the examples they give are ignorant and/or disingenuous. I agree there is a problem. It can and should be articulated in a better way.
May 11, 2012
Elle Gray I’m in the middle of work so I skimmed your post. I will read it more carefully. The first part that you quote from Mary is precisely the part that bugs me and that I discuss in this post. The neuroscience part I don’t know about. I didn’t comment directly on your post because I didn’t read it carefully yet. I’m not offended by your comments here but both the Sarewitz and Begely articles really tick me off. They are supposed to be scientist and they publish refutable commentaries.
August 23, 2012
I agree with you, Chad Haney. However, it’s deeper than even your description of it.
For instance, where is the line between knowledge & belief? And what is knowledge anyways?
I’ve come around to thinking that we really “know” very little and that almost everything we think we know is really belief, but there are ways of ranking beliefs – largely based on their powers to predict – that also lead one to entirely dismiss religion out of hand as absurd.
There is also confusion between the practice of science, the scientists who practice it, and the body of knowledge that is accreted by scientists who practice science over time. I think there must be a clear distinction made between arguments that scientists make mistakes, that there are flaws in the practice of science, and that there are errors in the body of knowledge.
Too often, in my experience, the anti-science crowd conflates these three. The obvious type is dissing a particular body of knowledge – say, evolution – because of mistakes that individual scientists make. It’s bollocks, of course; but too many people, I think, fall prey to that kind of fallacy.
August 23, 2012
Filippo Salustri there was a good article about the false logic of saying since science has been proven wrong once, it can never be trusted. I’ll try to dig it up and post it.
August 23, 2012
I’d love to see it Chad Haney if/when you find it. It sounds like the false logic is based on the assumption that deduction is the only legitimate form of logic.
August 23, 2012
I should have sent it to my Read later circle. I’ll dig for it.