[dfxm12]

Do we have to imagine? I'm sure many scientists in the field today were working in 1999. There's certainly enough data from the time to look at this in some level of detail, but Cherry picking an article and pointing out its flaws doesn't really prove much about the state of the field back then.

Maybe if the author mentioned that this article was highly regarded back then, there would be a point, but for all we know, the article was thought poorly of at the time and contemporary scientists just thought it slipped through the cracks.

It also doesn't talk about new controls in place today that would prevent a similarly poor article from being published, or even a system of "retracting" poor articles. I don't really trust that everything being published today is without flaw. After all, the other examples of bad science given are fairly recent.