| This is utter hogwash. I'm as critical as anyone (probably more so, check my comment history) of academic biology because of my background in it. There are certainly things wrong it. And due to the nature of biology, replicating results is really hard. It's a fact of life when you deal with systems that are not perfect, not identical and very opaque. But to say that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics" is stretching the problems of biology into a mountain of conspiracy. Furthermore, I'm reading your "source" and it reads loudly as "I'm an underfunded big-pharma research who has neither the time nor the resources to properly replicate studies". Did you know that most big pharma labs do not have access to the academic literature? They mostly read abstracts because there is little budget to actually purchase the required papers. How much do you trust labs that are A) only trying to recreate data so they can make a drug out of it and B) aren't even reading the original data? While academic labs can have grad students toil away on hard experiemnts for literally years before they perfect them...how long do you think Pfizer or Merck or Glaxco-Smith is going to let their paid researchers fiddle away on a project that is probably low priority anyway? Because, of course, the high-priority projects are the reformulations of penis-enlarging drugs or cholesterol medication...you know, the ones that actually make money. If you are looking for snake oil and shady research, I dare you to read any research paper that comes out of big pharma labs. We would routinely read them just for laughs because they are (often) downright terrible. |
To say "most big pharma labs" do not have access to the literature is laughable. We had better access than most academic institutions. If we needed a paper we didn't have access to, it took a few hours to get it. The company was more than willing to pay the $50 to get a copy of whatever paper, since we would often blow $50 running one experiment. Many of the smaller biotech might have poor access to journals, but even then, if you could justify the cost, you could get it.
Second of all, yes I trust labs that are trying to recreate data to make a drug out of it. You have to remember that these attempts to recreate data were a very important data point on a potential multi-million (billion?) dollar investment in a new target, these are NOT low priority projects. They WANT the data to be true. They have zero incentive for the data to not be reproducible.
Having worked in both academic and commercial labs, I would say the incentive to "tweak" results in much great in academic labs for the following reasons:
1) Often results are never double checked in an academic lab unless the work is use in a later project. Contrast this with a pharma lab where if the data is positive, you'll have to prove it again and again. 2) Academics (both profs and students) live and die by papers, not so in academic (in fact, in the company I worked in, they preferred if you didn't publish) 3) Work in academic is often performed by relatively inexperienced ungrad and grad students, while big pharma scientists often have years of experience.