[ms013]

Reminds me of a project (not in medicine) I had a couple years ago where my group was in the data science role for another group. We helped out with experimental design, data acquisition, and analysis. After all of our work, when we crunched the numbers, we found that the hypothesis being tested didn’t hold. The people funding the work were not at all happy, and went so far as to claim that “the plots must be wrong”. We showed them everything we had done, and nobody could find any issues with the analysis. But, they were irritated because we didn’t want to play the dishonest game of farting around with plots and numbers to make it look like the experiment worked. So, they angrily broke up with us. On the plus side, when I looked a year or two after, it looks like the grumpy people haven’t made any progress and are either out of business or something.

[overkalix]

At least you had the data... I've been a number of times in a situation where I was supposed to conduct extensive, thorough analyses of (expensively acquired) data that was evidently useless. I still had to go through the motions, knowing full well that if somehow the analysis yielded the "desired" results, any caveats would be ignored.