| Nesting is getting too deep, regarding:
>"I mean, here's Harold Varmus..." He has to say stuff like that as head of NCI. The slow progress is even noted on wikipedia, everyone knows it. This "cancer is so complicated" idea is being used as an "excuse" (not that it is definitely false): "Though there has been significant progress in the understanding of cancer biology, risk factors, treatments, and prognosis of some types of cancer (such as childhood leukemia[2]) since the inception of the National Cancer Act of 1971, progress in reducing the overall cancer mortality rate has been disappointing.[5][31] Many types of cancer remain largely incurable (such as pancreatic cancer[39]) and the overall death rate from cancer has not decreased appreciably since the 1970s.[40] The death rate for cancer in the U.S., adjusted for population size and age, dropped only 5 percent from 1950 to 2005.[3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer Before accepting that reason for the slow progress, we should consider that some are reporting only 10% of what gets published can be reproduced: "Although we in the cancer field hoped that this would lead to more effective drugs, historically, our ability to translate cancer research to clinical success has been remarkably low1. Sadly, clinical trials in oncology have the highest failure rate compared with other therapeutic areas."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a... Also, people are quitting cancer reproducibility projects out of disgust for the low quality of the research: "Early on, Begley, who had raised some of the initial objections about irreproducible papers, became disenchanted. He says some of the papers chosen have such serious flaws, such as a lack of appropriate controls, that attempting to replicate them is “a complete waste of time.” He stepped down from the project's advisory board last year.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1411 Others are estimating pretty much 50% of all biomed can't be reproduced: "The deeper problem is that much of cancer research in the lab—maybe even most of it—simply can’t be trusted. The data are corrupt. The findings are unstable. The science doesn’t work.
The resulting waste amounts to more than $28 billion: That’s two dozen Cancer Moonshots misfired in every single year."
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tens...
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour... Even Robert Wienberg refers to cancer research as an example of "Augean Stables": "'It’s a naÏveté that by simply embracing this ethic, which sounds eminently reasonable, that one can clean out the Augean stables of science,' says Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
http://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-sc... |