The Conservative Cave
Interests => The Science Club => Topic started by: Celtic Rose on May 13, 2012, 10:05:05 AM
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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.
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It would therefore be naive to believe that systematic error is a problem for biomedicine alone. It is likely to be prevalent in any field that seeks to predict the behaviour of complex systems — economics, ecology, environmental science, epidemiology and so on. The cracks will be there, they are just harder to spot because it is harder to test research results through direct technological applications (such as drugs) and straightforward indicators of desired outcomes (such as reduced morbidity and mortality).
http://www.nature.com/news/beware-the-creeping-cracks-of-bias-1.10600 (http://www.nature.com/news/beware-the-creeping-cracks-of-bias-1.10600)
Food for thought.
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The cracks have always been there.......that is what the peer review process is designed to combat, however even that can be corrupted (see "climate change") when enough political influence is present, and grant money for research is at stake........which is why I refuse to accept any premise that is drawn from government funded grants.......
doc
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The cracks have always been there.......that is what the peer review process is designed to combat, however even that can be corrupted (see "climate change") when enough political influence is present, and grant money for research is at stake........which is why I refuse to accept any premise that is drawn from government funded grants.......
doc
That "political influence" has been increasingly present in the scientific process, by both deliberate design under such auspices as "Scientific Integrity", and also by the corrupt practices of the government organizations being directly influenced by political and business agendas (FDA, EPA, etc)
In a related consideration, here is a video about a promising Cancer treatment developed by Dr Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D. Ph.D., and shows the corruption and horrors wrought by our medical institutions.
Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business (http://vimeo.com/24821365)
At the 33mins mark, it discusses the 1992 Prescription Drug User Fee Act:
- But in 1992, Congress put the fox in the chicken coop. It passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which authorized drug companies to pay "user fees" to the FDA for each brand-name drug considered for approval. Nearly all of the money generated by these fees has been earmarked to speed up the approval process.
In effect, the user fee act put the FDA on the payroll of the industry it regulates. Last year, fees came to about $300 million, which companies recoup many times over by getting their drugs to market faster.
But while it's a small investment for drug companies, it's a lot of money for the agency, and it has drastically changed the way it operates -- creating a disproportionate emphasis on approving brand-name drugs in a hurry. Consequently, the part of hte agency that reviews new drugs gets more than half of its money from user fees, and it has grown rapidly. Meanwhile the parts that monitor safety, ensure manufacturing standards, and check ads for accuracy have languished or even shrunk.
Most tellingly, the office that approves generic drugs is so small that approvl time for generics is twice as long as for brand-name drugs. There is now a backlog of more than 800 generics....
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The agency's cosiness with the industry is underscored by the composition of its 18 advisory committees -- outside expertts who help evaluate drugs.
Incredibly, many of these advisers work as consultants for drug companies. Although they are supposed to recuse themselves if there is a direct conflict of interest, the FDA regularly grants exempctions from that requirement..
Neither Congress, nor the FDA, requested this "user fee" structure, but rather the pharmaceutical industry did so voluntarily, going to Congress. The result is to make the pharmaceutical interests the "user" of the FDA, and not the public itself.
This 1hr 48min video is well worth viewing.
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The cracks have always been there.......that is what the peer review process is designed to combat, however even that can be corrupted (see "climate change") when enough political influence is present, and grant money for research is at stake........which is why I refuse to accept any premise that is drawn from government funded grants.......
When I worked at the Nebraska Department of Health, two times daily I took coffee-breaks with a physician from Minnesota, a old DFLer, and about as Democrat as they come.
However, there was a quirk in his thinking.
He was adamantly against taxpayer-funded scientific research, for reasons stated in this thread. At the time AIDS was the big deal, and he didn't like the way Robert Gallo and others in the National Institutes of Health were pushing one narrow angle in seeking the cause of the ailment, to the exclusion of others.
He insisted the government did great on distribution of mass-innoculations and all that--using the polio epidemic of the 1950s as his example--but he didn't like the odor of governmentally-funded research.
His thought was that research should be left up to others, and if was effective, then government should get the medicines out there.