The other day people demonstrated in various spots around the nation in what they called the March for Science. Now at what appears to be an official march-for-science website, we see the words: "On April 22, 2017 We marched. Now, we act." So basically it was a community organizing movement for political action. These days global warming is the popular theory that community organizers want to promote, and it's hard to imagine any other scientific theory that has been so polarizing. The smartest source of information on global warming can be found at Watts Up With That? The photo of the sign on the right came from there.
But this post isn't about global warming. It's about bad science. A while back some friends bragged on a book about Henrietta Lacks, the black lady whose unique cervical cancer cells got their own name - HeLa - and which have been involved in countless research projects. (The prevailing narrative is that Ms. Lacks was taken advantage of because she had not given knowledgeable consent for cloning of her cells and publication of her DNA sequencing.)
Unfortunately, it turns out that the cells had been contaminated early on, and much of the subsequent research was flawed. An article in the Wall Street Journal says an independent group studying misidentified cells reports that 113 of the 450 cases they've found involved the HeLa cells as the contaminate. That's from The Breakdown in Biomedical Research (paywalled).
Scientist who have spent countless hours and dollars on research are slow to fess up to mistakes. And when others try to reproduce the same results, they can't. We even have NPR explaining How Flawed Science Is Undermining Good Medicine.
So let's make the next march about scientific accuracy instead of advocacy.
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4:10 PM 4/24/2017
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