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.
I suspect that most readers will have heard the news that Charles Lieber, nanoscale materials chemist and chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, was arrested yesterday by federal agents. He was accused of providing false statements to government agencies about his involvement with China’s “Thousand Talents” program and wit… Read More
Word came out yesterday from Frances Arnold of Caltech (via her Twitter account) that she and her co-authors are retracting this paper from Science. The retraction notice itself has the details: After publication of the Report “Site-selective enzymatic C‒H amidation for synthesis of diverse lactams” (1), efforts to reproduce the work showed t… Read More
This paper is right, and it says things that need to be said. I wonder, though, if saying them will do any good. Let me explain what the heck I’m talking about! The paper is titled “Blocking the Hype-Hypocrisy-Falsification-Fakery Pathway is Needed to Safeguard Science“, and I don’t see how anyone can really disagree. When… Read More
This is not going to be a reassuring story – not for the biomedical literature, and not for the Chinese scientific establishment. But the head of the official Research Integrity initiative there, Xuetao Cao, a former head of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and current president of Nankai University, is now thoroughly involved in… Read More
The ways to mess around with the peer-review process are legion, but these schemes are getting a bit easier to catch. That’s what I take away from this paper, from two bibliographic scientists at Elsevier who set up a system to do just that. One hears tales of reviewers who will look more favorably on… Read More
It’s a summer Friday, so I’ll just send along this link to a story at Wired. It’s similar to this recent post, in that it details some of the ridiculous ways that small overseas manufacturers have tried to get around FDA site inspections. As a correspondent noted, though, the title of the Wired article isn’t… Read More
This article at Stat by Rebecca Robbins really caught me eye. It describes clinical trials where the participants are being asked to pay thousands of dollars just to join the trial. There seems to have been an increase in this sort of thing lately, and I’ll be completely clear: I think that’s a terrible idea… Read More
In case anyone was wondering, the commercial stem cell clinic business is still shady and full of hype, profiteering, and outright fraud. Overflowing with all of those, actually. And although there are people turning profits on this stuff all over the country, it may not surprise to learn that there’s an awful lot of it… Read More
One of my basic principles is that “Just because you can mess things up by going in one direction doesn’t mean that you can’t mess them up by doing the opposite”. And we may be proving that one again, with this example being the position of Chinese researchers in the US. I will stipulate up… Read More
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
