Nature: Cochrane Collaboration (evidence-based) rife with "top-down authoritarian culture"

Recently some major established labs have been going back through medical and social science seminal papers to try and reproduce the results.

Less than 15% reproducible.

Just wait till we get to the natural sciences.

I'm actually shifting a part of my lab and research budget into testing papers that are highly cited in my field. First 2 are already dead wrong. Major errors in each. Worst showed a systemic error which UNDERaccounted a variable by 124.6 percent

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More sad news. More frightening news. Where are we going as a nation and a world?

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For years you had a lot of people decide that a paper that showed a strong p value was worth fudging data...because they would get a fellowship, tenure, promotion, bonus, etc.

These weren't scientists. They are filth

Yep. Health studies are particularly susceptible to nonscience and antiscience (aka "bad" science, which is categorically no science at all) and corruption. Confirmation bias, ideological contamination, and $$$$$ don't mix well with an already fundamentally difficult field.

Epidemiology and observational studies are by their nature rife with dumb correlations and bad data from partipant questionnaires.

Also, rodents', and other mammals', even primates', physiologies differ from humans significantly. And double-blind, properly controlled, well-designed human trials have significant ethical, legal and practical limitations.

That's why we end up with numerous sets of competing health dogma, which ultimately fail.

People need (edit: want, rather) certainty or to just say frick it.

Variability.

so... statistics? bioinformatics?

Can someone ELI5. Did Cochrane expel the "Real" scientists in pursuit of more ideological pursuits? Or are they clearing the ideological scientists from the board?

Posting here to show the influence of championing an idea (and the long term, downstream implications)

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Bernard avait raison. Le germe n'est rien, c'est le terrain qui est tout.'

('Bernard was right. The microbe is nothing, the soil is everything.')

Louis Pasteur to Claude Bernard...

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For your scrutiny
Stay healthy PT
Question “dogma” and “settled science”. See sig quote...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/science/cancer-genetic-mutations.html

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Researchers Explore a Cancer Paradox Healthy cells carry a surprising number of cancer-linked mutations, but they don’t turn into tumors. What’s holding them back?

By Carl Zimmer
Oct. 18, 2018

Cancer

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The study also raised questions about efforts to detect cancer at its earliest stages, when cancer cells are still rare, Dr. Kennedy said: “Just because someone has mutations associated with cancer doesn’t mean actually they have a malignancy.”

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We are not slaves to our genetics
The way you “play your sheet of music” matters immensely:

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Cancer is a disease of mutations. Tumor cells are riddled with genetic mutations not found in healthy cells. Scientists estimate that it takes five to 10 key mutations for a healthy cell to become cancerous.

Some of these mutations can be caused by assaults from the environment, such as ultraviolet rays and cigarette smoke. Others arise from harmful molecules produced by the cells themselves. In recent years, researchers have begun taking a closer look at these mutations, to try to understand how they arise in healthy cells, and what causes these cells to later erupt into full-blown cancer. The research has produced some major surprises. For instance, it turns out that a large portion of the cells in healthy people carry far more mutations than expected, including some mutations thought to be the prime drivers of cancer. These mutations make a cell grow faster than others, raising the question of why full-blown cancer isn’t far more common.

“This is quite a fundamental piece of biology that we were unaware of,” said Inigo Martincorena, a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.

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The fricking hubris
“He” / geneticists have a pronoun problem, don’t believe me:

LINK

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An Old Idea, Revived:
Starve Cancer to Death
In the early 20th century, the German biochemist Otto Warburg
believed that tumors could be treated by disrupting their source
of energy. His idea was dismissed for decades — until now.

BY SAM APPLEMAY 12, 2016

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The story of modern cancer research begins, somewhat improbably, with the sea urchin. In the first decade of the 20th century, the German biologist Theodor Boveri discovered that if he fertilized sea-urchin eggs with two sperm rather than one, some of the cells would end up with the wrong number of chromosomes and fail to develop properly. It was the era before modern genetics, but Boveri was aware that cancer cells, like the deformed sea urchin cells, had abnormal chromosomes; whatever caused cancer, he surmised, had something to do with chromosomes.

Today Boveri is celebrated for discovering the origins of cancer, but another German scientist, Otto Warburg, was studying sea-urchin eggs around the same time as Boveri. His research, too, was hailed as a major breakthrough in our understanding of cancer. But in the following decades, Warburg’s discovery would largely disappear from the cancer narrative, his contributions considered so negligible that they were left out of textbooks altogether.

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In the years following his breakthrough, Warburg became convinced that the Warburg effect occurs because cells are unable to use oxygen properly and that this damaged respiration is, in effect, the starting point of cancer. Well into the 1950s, this theory — which Warburg believed in until his death in 1970 but never proved — remained an important subject of debate within the field. And then, more quickly than anyone could have anticipated, the debate ended. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick pieced together the structure of the DNA molecule and set the stage for the triumph of molecular biology’s gene-centered approach to cancer. In the following decades, scientists came to regard cancer as a disease governed by mutated genes, which drive cells into a state of relentless division and proliferation. The metabolic catalysts that Warburg spent his career analyzing began to be referred to as “housekeeping enzymes” — necessary to keep a cell going but largely irrelevant to the deeper story of cancer.

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They discovered the concept of DNA while in an altered state on LSD (look it up...)

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But over the past decade, and the past five years in particular, something unexpected happened: Those housekeeping enzymes have again become one of the most promising areas of cancer research. Scientists now wonder if metabolism could prove to be the long-sought “Achilles’ heel” of cancer, a common weak point in a disease that manifests itself in so many different forms. There are typically many mutations in a single cancer. But there are a limited number of ways that the body can produce energy and support rapid growth. Cancer cells rely on these fuels in a way that healthy cells don’t. The hope of scientists at the forefront of the Warburg revival is that they will be able to slow — or even stop — tumors by disrupting one or more of the many chemical reactions a cell uses to proliferate, and, in the process, starve cancer cells of the nutrients they desperately need to grow.

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Even James Watson, one of the fathers of molecular biology, is convinced that targeting metabolism is a more promising avenue in current cancer research than gene-centered approaches. At his office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, Watson, 88, sat beneath one of the original sketches of the DNA molecule and told me that locating the genes that cause cancer has been “remarkably unhelpful” — the belief that sequencing your DNA is going to extend your life “a cruel illusion.” If he were going into cancer research today, Watson said, he would study biochemistry rather than molecular biology. “I never thought, until about two months ago, I’d ever have to learn the Krebs cycle,” he said, referring to the reactions, familiar to most high-school biology students, by which a cell powers itself. “Now I realize I have to.”

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Don’t be domain dependent folks...
Question everything...

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Recently some major established labs have been going back through medical and social science seminal papers to try and reproduce the results.

Less than 15% reproducible.

Just wait till we get to the natural sciences.

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This was the 1st thing that I thought of when I saw the OP. It is now clear that much of what we thought was settled science was actually based on incomplete, improperly applied, or just straight up wrong research.

Muh Settled Science