More than half of high-impact cancer lab studies could not be replicated
It's funny how early 20th century science was filled with mind blowing discoveries and realizations that fundamentally changed how we viewed the universe and to some extent even life itself, while the early 21st century is filled with a surprisingly number of boring work churned out by overworked grad students, that turns out to be, in unsettling quantities, largely bad, irreproducible science.People love to blame bad statistics, but it's much more obvious that the issue is the "publish or perish" culture and a perpetual race to manufacture credibility in academia. If you're curious you can trace some of this back to the 70s when peer review as we know it today was essentially born, precisely as a means of proving credibility during a period of academic funding crunches.As much as it's easy to point a finger at academic I increasingly find the same thing in industry. Within my own career the number of companies that are doing nothing more than finding elaborate ways to burn investor funding (without even realizing they are participating in this) has grown to consume almost the entire tech industry.At this point the most shocking news isn't fraud, it would be to find someone out their down real, meaningful work.