Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More
The "acid bath" of empiricism is reproducibility; which is to ask, to test, whether the results of an experiment, a study, can be obtained by someone else following the same methods and using the same materials as reported by the original study's authors. How often, would you guess, do academic, peer reviewed and subsequently published study results suggesting molecular biological mechanisms susceptible to intervention, a/k/a "new drug targets", survive the bath? Generally? Nope. Usually? Nope? More often than not? Nope. Sometimes? Ok, even broken clocks are right twice a day. See "Reliability of 'new drug target; claims called into question'."
So what's going on here? Unfortunately all the incentives run in favor of confirming pre-existing biases when it comes to academic research and there are no incentives for disrupting the status quo. No one with hopes of getting her or his PhD writes up "How I Propose to Falsify My Department Rainmaker's Pet Theories" when soliciting a grant.
The game's afoot so remember that unreproduced conjectures have a very high probability of being false.
Exeunt.
