Guest essay by Dr. Patrick Michaels |
First, a disclaimer. I don’t listen to NPR. “State radio” bugs me. But I have friends who do, and I was bowled over when one sent me a seemingly innocuous story about the search for a pharmaceutical treatment for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis [ALS], the horrific ailment also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.I knew something big was about to happen when correspondent Richard Harris led off with this zinger:
There’s a funding crunch for biomedical research in the United States—and it’s not just causing pain for scientists and universities. It’s also creating incentives for researchers to cut corners—and that’s affecting people who are seriously ill.
Predictably, NPR, itself a federally (and privately) funded creature, said the problem was a lack of funding, even titling the piece, “Patients Vulnerable When Cash-Strapped Scientists Cut Corners.”
Allow NPR its sins, because what’s in the article is one key to a very disturbing trend, not just in biomedical science, but in “most disciplines and countries.” It seems that negative results are systematically disappearing from science. Those words appear in the title of a blockbuster 2012 article by University of Montreal’s Daniele Fanelli, more completely, “Negative Results are Disappearing from Most Disciplines and Countries.”
Memo to NPR: Scientists are always “cash-strapped.” Just ask one. The reason is very simple, and can be illustrated by my area, climate science.
There are actually very few people formally trained at the doctoral level in this field (yours truly being one of them). One reason was that, prior to the specter of anthropogenerated climate change, there wasn’t very much money from the federal government. It was about a $50 million a year operation, if that much. We didn’t have enough research dough.
Now the federal outlay is $2.3 billion. Guess what: we’re all climate scientists now. So ecologists, plant biologists, and even psychologists hitched their wagons to this gravy train. Today’s shocker: we don’t have enough research dough.
What Harris found out about ALS really does apply in a Fanelli-like fashion. It seems that drugs that work fine on mice and rats flop miserably when tested on humans. It turns out that the animal studies were all pretty shoddy.
Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explained why. According to NPR, “There is no single answer, she says, but part of the explanation relates to a growing issue in biomedical science: the mad scramble for scarce research dollars.” She went on: “The field has become hypercompetitive,” and NPR added, “Many excellent grant proposals get turned down, simply because there’s not enough money to go around. So Landis says scientists are tempted to oversell weak results.”
“Getting a grant requires that you have an exciting story to tell, that you have preliminary data and you have published”, she says. “In the rush, to be perfectly honest, to get a wonderful story out on the street in a journal, and preferably with some publicity to match, scientists can cut corners.”
According to a research paper published earlier this year, corner-cutting turned out to be the rule, rather than the exception, in animal studies of ALS.
Stefano Bertuzzi, the executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology, says that’s because there is little incentive for scientists to take the time to go back and verify results from other labs;
“You want to be the first one to show something”, he says—not the one to verify or dispute a finding, “because you won’t get a big prize for that.”
Landis noted that “ALS is not the only example of this type of wishful science [emphasis added].” She found similar problems with other drugs for other diseases.
It’s too bad that NPR didn’t then go to Montreal’s Fanelli, because they would have found that similar problems are infecting science everywhere, which is why Cato now has a Center for the Study of Science.
Coming up: I’ll be posting soon on what this does to science itself. Teaser: if there’s little incentive to publish negative results, whatever reigning paradigm is operating in a given field will be very resistant to change. As the Center for the Study of Science’s Richard Lindzen has observed, there has been a remarkable lack of paradigm substitution in overall science as research budgets ballooned. Ironically, the more we spend on science, the more science can be harmed.
Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
So, we should conclude that we’ve devolved from the Golden Age of Medicine, which was… er, in the year 1997 (?)
I listened to Inskeep’s intro, then listened to the interview by Richard Harris, and I heard this message very strongly: The scramble for federal dollars is making medical researchers cut corners. Well, shame on those federal research funding agencies. Less urgent was the message, buried deep in the interview, of the medical official who says that it’s less about the dollars and more about a “culture” of the researchers which leads them to cut corners. I would state it another way. It’s not about the federal funding, and it isn’t about the competition for “scarce federal funds”, however fierce the competition and scarce the funds. It’s about the character of the people who expect those funds.
I would argue there have always been “Nostrums and Quackery”
http://books.google.com/books/about/Nostrums_and_Quackery.html?id=8AVEAAAAIAAJ
and the pseudoscientific journals that claim to validate them. As for today’s skullduggery, I tend to think any association that gives us such delights as “Physician Specialty Codes”, and wields the largest political lobying budget of any organization in the U.S. probably ought to be suspect in overtly one-sided findings of the research they sponsor. Read about the outright thuggery of the young AMA in the 1900’s, actually run by an extortionist. In order to deal a blow to the successful “patent medicine” industry, the AMA enforced strict compliance among its members to abide by the “code”. It also made it very difficult to practice if you weren’t a member.
Paul DeKruif’s biographical book, Microbe Hunters, 1926, is a delightful, if slightly bombastic reminder of the perils of research in the field of microbiology. Van Lewenhoek, Koch, Lister, Reed, Pasteur, were all great men who endured all manner of difficulties in their discoveries and their hunt for cures to deadly diseases. Politicking for grants, propaganda aganst oponents, smear campaigns, backbiting, research doctoring – all part of the research sop of their respective day.
I don’t believe things were ever better, not that things are so hot the way they are. I enjoyed thinking about this topic. Thanks, Dr. Michaels.
This gives additional information as to why the ALS foundation has gone out for private donations using the “Ice Bucket” challenge.
Integrity should not depend on compensation. This is the same nonsense which is cited for criminal poverty. If these people are underfunded, then they should either resign or defend their demand for a larger budget.
is it even possible to “cure” your DNA ? maybe you can relieve some symptoms but cure ? I doubt it …
Most money spend on finding these “cures” is wasted, same for most cancer research … you can’t cure DNA …
Another very worthwhile read that discusses how a predominant opinion in a field of science, at the mercy of human nature, skews the published literature, funding and the studies themselves to favor those supporting it begins…
“On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.
But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me”
http://www.webcitation.org/6SgCvSc3w
For Pharmaceutical companies, on-going treatments and maintenance are more profitable than a cure might be. These companies must make enormous profits to offset litigation. The US is so litigious that one bad drug might bankrupt a company.
Presently on my TV, one Channel carries a Xarelto ad. The next carries a lawfirm who’ll sue Xarelto for you.
.Everyone is victimized except the lawyers..
Human-connected climate change funding has also sucked dollars away from research in other areas. How? Fund owners like the publicity associated with their philanthropy. So they fund what is hot and fashionably reportable to fund. Tax dollars likewise. Politicians of all shapes, sizes, and beliefs, hop on hot bandwagons, regardless of the topic. And then they budget research tax dollars into that hot topic. Meanwhile, others areas of research get short changed because they ain’t hot and newsworthy. If it bleeds it leads. If you want it to lead, make it bleed.