| While I agree that "Science has been supplanted by money and politics" is going way overboard. I'm going to take the other side of the argument because I think you are way off base. I worked in both an academic lab and a "big pharma" lab(4 years and 6 years respectively). 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. |
>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.
I'll admit that my knowledge of big pharma journal access is colored by those in big pharma that I've talked to (anecdotal evidence, oh the irony). Perhaps they just had poor departments or bad access, I don't know.
However, every university that I've been at has instant access to journals. I never had to wait hours for a paper...we had free reign of just about every journal. Even at my relatively small and poor undergraduate institute.
>1) Often results are never double checked in an academic lab unless the work is use in a later project.
99% of projects in academia are building off some previous grad student or post-doc's work. Sure, there are projects which are nearly impossible to replicate (I should know, I spent 1.5 years of my life trying to replicate a previous grad's project). But it's equally laughable to say that data is never double-checked - professor's career is a long string of projects building on previous projects.
>2) Academics (both profs and students) live and die by papers, not so in [industry]
I'll concede that there is often pressure to publish positive results in an academic setting. However, as you rightly mentioned, academics live and die by their papers. It just takes one lab refuting your paper to have a burned career. While I agree that many academics prefer to just ignore papers they can't recreate, there is still a lot riding on publishing replicable data.
>3) Work in academic is often performed by relatively inexperienced ungrad and grad students, while big pharma scientists often have years of experience.
This is a pretty baseless statement? I know plenty of techs working at big pharma that just graduated with an undergrad degree and have zero of wet-bench experience (just like I know of plenty who did the same in academia). Conversely, I can't even count the number of post-docs and senior scientists that work at various universities, with literally centuries of experience between them.