THE AMERICAN THINKER – Stand up for science! We saw these rallies across the United States on March 7th to protest cuts in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. But should we blindly believe the science? No — and how do I know?
I was a scientist in academia for over 20 years. I earned a Ph.D. from Rutgers University and worked at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
My dreams of what it was like to be a scientist were shattered early on. I had envisioned a world with me in the basement with the likes of Marie Curie making exciting discoveries.
Instead, I encountered a world where career advancement trumped a pursuit of the truth, a world where “publish or perish” ruled the day. No paper, no money for your lab. Period. And the motherlode for money is the NIH.
The system invites bad science and cheating. I could write endlessly about the cheating I observed. One common way is to simply toss out mice that didn’t “cooperate.”
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Namely, you had a hypothesis, did the experiment, but didn’t get a statistical difference. But, you think, if I toss out the data from two mice in Group A and one in Group B, I’d have a difference. Yay! Let’s publish!
You might be asking, “Why not publish the negative results — you had a good hypothesis, but it didn’t work out?” Because — prepare for the insanity –you cannot publish “negative data.”
Bad for you (no paper) and bad for Dr. Smith across the pond who is currently wasting time and money doing the exact same experiment (yes, you weren’t the only one with that hypothesis).
Then there’s the interaction that wasn’t — published in a prestigious journal. The “discovery?” Molecules A and B bound together! It was a big discovery in cancer research …