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Those of us in other fields of science tend to hold up biomed as an example of how not to run a science. They tend to have a shoddy idea of experiment design and statistics. Same way when I was a student it was always the premeds who did all the cheating.

Well, science is rather like democracy in that regard. It doesn't prevent mistakes, but what makes it better than other things people have tried is that it has a mechanism for correcting them.

A few years back one of the USA's leading medical journals changed their rules to allow doctors who are receiving money from pharmaceuticals to publish reviews of the drugs sold by those same pharmaceuticals. We may have a problem that runs deeper than "cutting corners".

I've actually been on a ranting spree the past couple of days due to terrible journal manuscript submissions I've had to review recently. I can't tell you the number of times I've read a submission that was outright published in another periodical. Many foreign submitters don't understand the concept of plagiarism, let along self plagiarism. These "scientists" are ranked and compensated by the number of publications they produce, so they publish one piece of research and try to pass it off in as many periodicals as possible, essentially representing old research as brand new. This compensation system has obscured the true purpose of publication: what was once a means to disseminate your work to the general population is now a means to get you and your lab more money.

I take my responsibility as a reviewer very seriously; the job of a scientist is not only to create new research, but to critique and evaluate the research of others. But many academics who have been in the field longer than I approach reviewing as a chore, and only focus on half of the interesting part of their job, the research. I don't know how many of these terrible publications slip through the cracks due to lazy reviewers, but I'm sure it's more than I'm comfortable to admit to myself.

Full text available here [davidrasnick.com].

No, its a little worse than that. The honest guy doesn't get tenure, and is eventually fired. The dishonest guy remains a "scientist" for life. So in the steady state, there will be many, many more dishonest "scientists" than honest ones.

And that's what *really* pissed me off about academia. Guys like that never get tenure, never get thanked. With so many of the people I worked with, "hypothesis" was synonymous with "foregone conclusion." The standard practice was to come up with your hypothesis, cook up a bunch of data to support it (dismissing any evidence that contradicted it with a little intellectual sleight-of-hand), publish, and then get your promotions and tenure. The guys who treated their hypotheses as ACTUAL hypotheses (that they might actually find to be wrong) were treated like bad researchers, when in fact, they were the *good* researchers. With so many people cooking the numbers, it began to be assumed that if your hypotheses weren't always proven right, it meant you were somehow flawed.

And look at many of the complaints he has about academic research in this 'paper'.

"In addition, preclinical testing rarely includes predictive biomarkers that, when advanced to clinical trials, will help to distinguish those patients who are likely to benefit from a drug."

When I publish a paper, I'm trying to present the the interesting findings in regards to the molecular system I'm studying. Finding a bunch of associated biomarkers is an entirely different study. If you expect me to write multiple studies/papers rolled into one and replicate the experiments over and over in dozens of cell lines and animal models, you better be paying me to do it, because I don't have the funding for that in the small budget I got for the proposed study funded by taxpayers through the NIH. When I wrote the grant to do the study, I didn't even know I would find anything for sure, so I didn't ask for a budget 20x the size so I could replicate it in every model out there to look for biomarkers as well, just in case I found something. Asking for that is a good way to have your grant rejected in the first place. My paper was to find the interesting thing. By publishing it I'm saying, 'we found something interesting, please fund us or other researchers to take the next step and replicate, test in other systems, etc, etc. Publishing my results does not mean 'Big Pharma should go ahead and spend $10 million trying this in humans right now!'

"Given the inherent difficulties of mimicking the human micro-environment in preclinical research, reviewers and editors should demand greater thoroughness."

It's tough to do. That's why we typically do small bite-size chunks. That and the size of our grants allow us to do the bite-size chunks. Want greater thouroughness? Increase our funding. Ohh, but that's from taxpayers, and you want them to spend all the money doing research so you don't have to.

"Studies should not be published using a single cell line or model, but should include a number of well-characterized cancer cell lines that are representative of the intended patient population. Cancer researchers must commit to making the difficult, time-consuming and costly transition towards new research tools, as well as adopting more robust, predictive tumour models and improved validation strategies. "

Cancer researchers must commit to the costly transition? Yes, yes, research is being held up because all those academics, with all their mega-millions in earnings each year, just aren't willing to pony up the cash to do their experiments right. We live off grants. If there isn't funding to do a huge study, we can't. Simple. No 'not willing to commit' involved.

"Similarly, efforts to identify patient-selection biomarkers should be mandatory at the outset of drug development."

Once again, the budget for that wasn't in my grant because I didn't know I would even find anything, let alone need to find every associated biomarker. Want to know the biomarkers? Then pay for it, or wait for me to publish this first paper, then write another grant asking for funding to look for biomarkers now that I've got a very good reason to look for them and spend the money. In a rush? Either pony up the cash or stop whining about taxpayer-funded academics not providing everything to you on a silver platter in record time.