[ExI] Medical "research"?

[Kelly Anderson]

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 8:04 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> In cancer science, many "discoveries" don't hold up
> By Sharon Begley, Reuters
> Mar. 28, 2012 11:09AM PDT
>
> NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that
> many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from
> university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for
> producing new medicines in the future.

Quoting:
Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic
by Bart Kosko

Theme 4:
Don't Confuse Science with Scientists

""Scientists have in large part treated fuzzy theory and fuzzy
theorists badly. Some of us asked for it. All of us got it. In the end
that process strengthens fuzzy theory and fuzzy theorists. Adversity,
like muscle stress, works that way.
In the meantime many of us lost our faith in science. That was a deep
disappointment for those of us who had earlier lost faith in religion
and government. Science was not salvation. Career science, like career
politics, depends as much on career maneuvering, posturing, and
politics as it depends on research and the pursuit of truth. Few know
that when they start the game of science. But they learn it soon
enough.
The hardest things I learned in my fuzzy quest were that modern
science does not welcome a truly new idea. And it makes mistakes even
at the "self-evident" level of logic and math.
Science prefers small steps to large creative leaps. Modern science
often behaves no better with new ideas than the Roman Catholic Church
behaved when it forced Galileo to renounce his belief that the Earth
rotates about the Sun. Unlike the church, modern bivalent science does
not claim to possess all knowledge. It claims to follow the only road
to knowledge.""

An interesting book... about much more than it's subject matter. It
doesn't surprise me in the least that scientific results are hard to
duplicate. Yet the scientific method requires that results be
duplicated. Nobody of course will publish duplicate work unless you do
a hell of a lot of it, like these companies did.

-Kelly