I wanted to add something that I saw linked from the Times Higher Education website (also not open access) - it is far, far easier to blame "individuals", or bad apples, rather than a pervasive culture or "the whole barrel is rotten". My criticisms are directed at science policy and systemic failures in funding and academic research, and I'm far from the only person with these views. This article was published in Current Topics in Developmental Biology, and is behind a paywall so I'm essentially pirating it on dropbox to contribute to this discussion.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gzon5krlgos6mbe/1-s2.0-S0070215315002203-main.pdf
Publish or perish has real-life effects. A culture of encouraging people to "choose" data that will allow them to spin a narrative that will get them the highest impact publications as opposed to the most "correct" interpretation is pervasive. It's also worth highlighting that because biology is so damned complex, there are a multitude of angles and interpretations for any one study, so a "high impact" interpretation might not necessarily be wrong.. It's just that it usually is, and because of the rush put out on publishing quickly and "impactfully", people are encouraged to take the most adventurous interpretation and journal-shop, hoping that it gets by a couple of lenient reviewers. I mentioned stem cells as being a sub-field where there's a tonne of irreproducibility, rubbish and incorrect interpretation because of low standards in sub-field conventions, you suggested that we write off the entire field as "unscientific". My criticisms apply equally to the sub-field of cancer research. Seeing that only 6/53 "landmark" cancer studies published in the trifecta of
Nature, Science, Cell could be
replicated by Amgen (they were trying to figure out why their clinical trials had such a ridiculously high failure rate), perhaps we should also write off cancer biology?
Considering that (in the case of the US government) the non-defence R&D budget makes up $69 billion (2015 figures) and the NIH budget for 2015 grants is $30 billion, the problem of a "rotten barrel" in the life sciences is not trivial. This is just the US too; where I am right now, the biomedical research budget forms an even larger percentage of the budget in an effort to "grow the biotech industry".
The reason why I am uninterested in talking about "high minded" discussion of ideals and "truth" that have no relation to how research is conducted in reality is because I dedicated the last 17 years of my life towards becoming a life scientist, hoping to make a difference to public health. I have lost friends and family to cancer. I have met with patients who suffer from debilitating, incurable, untreatable neurodegenerative disease, and overheard my PhD supervisor sneer that he "hated having to come to these things to network for small grant funding". There is a very very real human impact that renders chasing academic impact and political influence towards personal advancement incredibly distasteful to me. Talking about philosophy of science and its epistemological relationship to the truth might be relevant to the interests of physical scientists, but I am more interested in having treatments
work for patients. Especially since there is good evidence that efficacy of treatment is highly dependent on individual genetics, cultural background, lifestyle and even the patient's relationship to the medical practitioner. The way that we consider/conduct basic research, clinical trials, and administer healthcare needs to change. Pointing fingers at the individual "bad apples" while defending the status quo of the rotten barrel and its public perception as being "fact/truth" makes me very suspicious. In my experience, those who do so have a vested interest in being held unaccountable and preserving influence.