A Disingenuous Take On The Vaccine-Autism Fraud
The British Medical Journal has just published an editorial titled "Assuring Research Integrity in the Wake of Wakefield" that addresses what has finally been revealed to have been an elaborate fraud concocted by a scientist and some personal injury lawyers in an effort to launch a mass tort. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the real problem (which is that the majority of the published peer-reviewed papers purporting to find an association between some drug or exposure or gene and a disease are probably false) the authors of the editorial reference a handful of ethical lapses spaced about twenty years apart and ask "[h]ow could this happen again?"; implying rather obviously that scientific fraud is almost as rare as Piltdown Man but nonetheless something about which the academy ought to be vigilant lest the public lose faith in "science".
They conclude with "We must transcend traditional hierarchies and authority gradients to empower everyone in the research enterprise ... to raise questions and "stop the line". I've no idea what the first part means though it sounds suspiciously like something out of "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". The latter part on the other hand, quite inadvertently I assume, manages to expose the real problem with today's "research enterprise". It refers to the ability of factory workers on an automobile assembly line to halt the process when they detect a problem rather than having to wait until a supervisor calls for a stop. Focus then on the idea that many "researchers" aren't involved in the process of discovery or even design. Rather their part is played down on the assembly line of the Science factory - manufacturing the same sort of science; shift after shift, day after day, year after year. Their job is to identify anything that might throw a wrench in the works or cause the product to be defective and thus rejected by the customer, typically the government, industry or an NGO, to repair or engineer around it and to keep the line running.
The authors' concern then is with the process and not the product. But of course, if you've been paying attention, you know by now that the product is the real problem. In studies like Wakefield's, in which statistics are trotted out to test hypotheses, the "science" is probably wrong even if the researcher isn't consciously cooking the books in order to gin up a mass tort. Read and re-read "Odds Are, It's Wrong" from ScienceNews. Let the following quote sink in: "There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims."
Whether or not the product of the Science factory is worth its price or indeed worth anything at all, it keeps on coming in an ever increasing torrent. Take for example genome-wide association studies (GWAS) - one of the most notorious examples of too often useless "research" produced assembly line style. (Note there are efforts to improve it. See e.g. "A Knowledge-Based Weighting Framework to Boost the Power of Genome-Wide Association Studies") A quick search of PubMed reveals that 45 new genome wide association studies have rolled off the line in just the last week. That's great news if you're in the business of selling SNP chips to research universities and a sign of a boom (or bubble) in the fortune of researchers. And maybe it's even good for the economy - being after all a form of digging holes and filling them back in. But where does it end?
Ponder the following from "The Future of the Research University" written in 1997: "We need to think seriously, within the community of research universities, about whether we are producing too many Ph.Ds. This is a controversial question, with different answers in different scholarly disciplines, but the general conclusion seems inescapable: The mathematidcs of exponential growth - each professor producing numerous Ph.Ds who become professors who produce numerous Ph.Ds, etc. - has caught up with us."
With that exponential growth in Ph.Ds desperate for something to research and something to publish it's no wonder that so many turn to statistical tools which, when rigorously and repeatedly applied to any mound of data, will inevitably produce a publishable statistically significant, though often false, result. And despite concern that the exponential growth in the number of Ph.Ds "has caught up with us" there's no sign that the factory is cutting back on the number of shifts. Instead, more factories are being built. Indeed what got me thinking about this was a huge billboard on I-45 announcing that what was once the humble but excellent Teachers' College is now itself a Research University! Sure enough, a stroll through their website reveals that they've bought a great pile of extremely expensive analytical equipment and will soon be adding to the mountain of Science being manufactured. Everybody it sometimes seems is getting in on the "research enterprise".
The point then is that research has become an industry; and an enormous one at that. Best then to stay as skeptical of Big Research and Big Research Publication (note the circle the wagons approach of the Lancet's editorial board when they first got whiff of the fraud) as you are of Big Corporation. And best then as well to train your attention on the product of factory Science even if the process by which it was made is sound. Remember, it's generally not enough to say simply that it was made According to Plan.
