What would we do without research?
On a steamy summer day inside the lecture auditorium of the storied National Institutes of Health headquarters, Dr. Michael Bracken delivered a stark message to an audience that dedicated its life, and owed its living, to medical research.
As much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient, the respected Yale University epidemiologist declared in a sobering assessment for a federal research agency that spends about $40 billion a year on medical studies.
He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.
A government bureaucracy wasting time and money on unrelated useless research? Sounds normal.
Climate Change anyone….??
Whenever you see click bait that includes the weasel words like may, might, possibly and their ilk, you know that the results haven’t been verified, that the results might not be believable to their peers, and that, in short, reading it is probably a waste of time and now, your money by extension.
What would we do without medical research? We would be stuffing kids into iron lungs.
The rationale is like the following.
1. Publish a paper using obtained data.
2. Examine data more closely.
3. If there’s a mistake, publish a “revised” study. Presto! two publications for the price of one, thereby padding one’s CV and increasing the chances of getting funded or being granted tenure.
just relate any health issue to climate change, and yer good to go
Failure is normal, without failure you will achieve Zero advance….Discouraging Ideas is self defeating. Show me an Engineer or Scientist who has not ever been wrong… And I will show you a fake…..There is a reason that Errors & Omission insurance is required.. I have never know an Engineer that was deliberately wrong, but mostly errored by omission (lazy) & promptly corrected when made aware of their mistake…
There is a reason that medical doctors are called “A Practice” they deal with complex probability.
I have no idea what engineering you practiced, but in aerospace engineering, there is very little margin for error to get into production, so there is a long and, perhaps, tedious process of reviews and tests to eliminate the errors before final sell off. The final product better be error free, and if for some reason it isn’t, the whole world may know about it, as Boeing recently found out. And then there was no blase platitude about
Failure is normal, without failure you will achieve Zero advance….Discouraging Ideas is self defeating. Show me an Engineer or Scientist who has not ever been wrong… And I will show you a fake…..There is a reason that Errors & Omission insurance is required.. I have never know an Engineer that was deliberately wrong, but mostly errored (sic) by omission (lazy) & promptly corrected when made aware of their mistake…
But inquisitions about how Boeing can possibly deliver a defective product.
Even if you are just submitting a paper for publication in an academic environment, you probably would make sure there are no egregious mistakes in the paper. The problem is usually not making that kind of mistake, but whether the particular research is worth the while to begin with. The underlying problem is a prime example of what President Eisenhower warned in his parting address about the military industrial complex. Few people remember that he also warned about federal funding of scientific researches. That is especially true when the agencies who do the funding have axes to grind, such as in the case of so-called anthropogenic global warming. Dr. Bracken may be addressing the same problem in medical research. BTW, I am by no means exempting my own graduate research field of physics. The problem is endemic any time a huge amount of money is involved.
The only time I read from a medical journal was when the graduate students shared offices in outside trailers. I was accosted by a fellow grad student to help out a friend with problems with an article he was assigned to read, from a medical journal. He was a grad student in biology, whereas we were in physics.
His problem was with English. Even my friend, whose English was normally better than adequate, had trouble. They had several English-Chinese dictionaries open, but couldn’t find the words. In STEM you used math that most laymen do not understand. But to keep the mystery from the average layman, in biology you had to use high faluting words. So I translated for them.
In a nutshell, it was a study of some condition in newborn babies generally thought to be prenatal. The study postulated that the condition may possibly be postnatal as well. The conclusion was that the evidence was inconclusive on whether it could be postnatal or not.
That being my only exposure to biological research, I was not impressed.
The students should have studied Old Latin first, or at least had a crash course in it to get the root words down pat. It would’ve made their task easy.