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Cheating, tweaking the data and the view of academic biomedical output from industry

I talk occasionally with an exceptionally bright former Ph.D. student of mine who works now in pharma. I wanted my next post to be positive--there is no lack of good things to say about the nation's biomedical research enterprise--but a conversation I just had with him prompted this post instead.

My conversation with my former student exactly mirrored discussions I have had with other scientists in pharma and biotech in this regard: a high proportion of the output from academic labs can't be reproduced and is thus worse than useless.  "Worse" because it sends companies down dead-end avenues, wasting money and scientific talent that otherwise could be pursuing potential disease therapies with a chance of working.  An article in the Wall Street Journal, quoting Bruce Alberts (a  prominent scientist and former editor of a prestigious research journal), puts it this way:

Two years ago, a group of Boston researchers published a study describing how they had destroyed cancer tumors by targeting a protein called STK33. Scientists at biotechnology firm Amgen Inc. quickly pounced on the idea and assigned two dozen researchers to try to repeat the experiment with a goal of turning the findings into a drug.

This is one of medicine's dirty secrets: Most results, including those that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can't be reproduced. "It's a very serious and disturbing issue because it obviously misleads people" who implicitly trust findings published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, says Bruce Alberts, editor of Science. . . .

The WSJ article cites a study by the pharmaceutical company Bayer that found that company scientists had to halt 64% of  early drug projects based claims in the literature due to inability to replicate published results: A lot has been written about scientific fraud and how (unsurprisingly) it is probably more prevalent in the highest-prestige journals, about how the scientific literature is biased towards positive results and about the pressures of  "publish or perish." I don't have anything new to say about these pressures on academic scientists: pressures that underlie the problem of there being so much garbage in the literature. I will only say this: the "soft money" system that makes scientists' livelihood dependent on winning grants plus the current brutal funding environment is a perfect formula for ensuring increased levels of scientific cheating and the resulting waste and damage to efforts to cure diseases.
Posted by GrantSlave at 3:35 PM 
GrantSlave is a physician-scientist working in academic medicine. He is the product of an inordinately long course of post-graduate education together with a bit of youthful idealism (now mostly gone) and just a hint of masochism. He earned dual M.D.-Ph.D. degrees through the National Institute of Health’s Medical Scientist Training Program. This was followed by internship, residency and then a fellowship with combined subspecialty and research training. He spends most of his work hours running an NIH-funded (for the time being) research program. He also sees patients; teaches medical students, residents and fellows; fills out pages and pages of administrative paperwork; frets about getting his research published and funded; and invests a lot of time convincing himself that the grass is not necessarily greener over the hill.
