Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "The Dark Side"

• The Dark Side

  Too Much Wasted Time

  3 May, 2019

  Here’s a note of warning sounded in a lead editorial in Nature: . . .I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research. . . . . .many researchers… Read More

• Animal Testing

  An Expensive Choice for Duke

  27 March, 2019

  You may have seen the headlines about a large settlement ($112.5 million) that Duke University is paying the government. This goes back to Erin Potts-Kant, a clinical research coordinator at Duke Health, as well as (former) professor William Foster and (former) chief of the Pulmonary Division Monica Kraft. The details are many, and some of them… Read More

• General Scientific News

  India’s Disgrace

  15 February, 2019

  I’ve written here about what I referred to as “nationalist science”, in that case actions by the Hungarian government against its own universities and the Chinese government’s vigorous promotion of traditional medicine. Now we can (unfortunately) add another one to the list. The Hindu nationalist movement in India has been m… Read More

• The Dark Side

  Systematic Fraud

  8 February, 2019

  Here’s a personal experience with fraudulent scientific literature, as reported in Nature: In 2015, I discovered several papers had been written about a gene that I and my colleagues first reported in 1998. All were by different authors based in China, but contained shared and strange irregularities. They also used highly similar language and… Read More

• Drug Prices

  Blame the FDA for This Fiasco

  14 December, 2018

  Back in 2013 and again in 2016, I wrote about Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, a South Florida company whose business plan I found repellant. That’s because said plan involved running an old generic compound (3,4-diaminopyridine) through the FDA modern approval process, which under the agency’s rules would grant them market exclusivity. I have… Read More

• Business and Markets

  The Dark Side of a Wonderful Investment Story

  10 September, 2018

  Biopharma investing has been a constantly erupting geyser of cash these last few years, and wherever there is that amount of money flying around, you will find people ready to help make it disappear. And you’ll find people who are willing to stretch the truth in any way that they find necessary to get in… Read More

• The Dark Side

  India Tries to Deal With Predatory Publishers

  30 August, 2018

  There’s more activity on the predatory journal front. A large investigation reported recently that the number of papers put out by the five largest publishers in this category has tripled since 2015, so there’s clearly an expanding market for such “services”. Among the elite (by which I mean the top layer of this pond scum) Read More

• Current Events

  Deliberate Vaccine Misinformation

  24 August, 2018

  Over on my Twitter feed, which veers off-topic a bit more often than this blog, I had a series of tweets the other day about troll/bot accounts. And as fate would have it, that very subject now intersects more closely with a focus on biomedical news. This new paper in the American Journal of Public… Read More

• Inorganic Chemistry

  A Room Temperature Superconductor? Well. . .

  13 August, 2018

  Superconductivity is one of those places where chemistry and physics cross paths. That’s especially true as people search for higher-temperature materials, because that seems to involve more and more complex synthesis and characterization of the results. Very tiny changes in conditions or starting materials can make for huge differences in th… Read More

• The Dark Side

  How Many Doctored Papers Are Out There?

  2 July, 2018

  Just how much crap is out there in the scientific literature? “Quite a bit” comes the answer from anyone with real experience of it, but that’s not too quantitative. Here, though is an analysis of one (perfectly respectable) journal of its own output, and the results are. . .well, they range from “pretty bad” to… Read More