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"

• 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

• Business and Markets

  Welcome to Right to Try

  21 June, 2018

  Update: Brainstorm has now abandoned their Right-to-Try approach. Who’s next? That didn’t take long. That didn’t take long at all. The federal “Right to Try” bill was just signed the other week, and we already have a company that’s willing – no, eager – to try it out. I will now cruelly caricature som… Read More

• General Scientific News

  Science Reform in China

  11 June, 2018

  There have been all sorts of scientific scandals involving faked journal articles, faked peer reviews, duplicated papers and figures, etc. over the last few years. It’s been a running battle: our current technologies allow for these things to be done more easily, but caught more easily as well. And a pretty significant share of these… Read More

• Snake Oil

  A New Low for Dr. Oz

  7 June, 2018

  Pardon me this morning while I rant a little. In fact, it’s worse: pardon me while I rant a little about something that I’ve ranted about before. I refer to that disgrace to the medical profession, Dr. Mehmet Oz. I haven’t mentioned him on the site in a while, because really, why bother? Nothing that… Read More

• Chemical News

  Ark Pharm’s Shady Side

  4 June, 2018

  Once in a while we have discussions of chemical suppliers around here – but we haven’t had one like this. On Friday afternoon, word came out that Ark Pharm, a reasonably well-known firm out of Chicago, had been raided by the DEA. That becomes abundantly clear if you try to access the company’s web site. Read More