10th December 2021
More than half of high-impact cancer lab studies could not be replicated
This entry was posted on Friday, December 10th, 2021 at 07:20 and is filed under News You Can Use..
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
December 10th, 2021 at 12:34
When I was in college, there was a “Canadian Rat” study that came out saying that coffee causes cancer. My physics prof at the time was a coffee lover and bought the papers and read them thoroughly. He made a short speech to our class regarding the whole thing. In order to consume the relative amount of coffee fed to the rats, one would have to drink a cup of coffee every 5 minutes, all day long, for 10 years. In his words, you could literally inject those mice with anything in that quantity and cause a bad reaction.
The best “The Dose Makes the Poison” analogy I ever heard was this: If you take one aspirin every day for 10 years, you will consume 3,652 aspirin and you are not likely to have any serious effects. On the other hand, if you sit down and consume 3,652 aspirin all at once, you will definitely have a serious medical complication. In fact, it would kill you.
But all of the “science” reports that we see in the news today are really “pop-sci”, and they are done solely to generate money. Real scientific research is often very boring. (I remember a friend in college working on a project to isolate some rare part of a cell by processing 5 gallon buckets of chicken gizzards every day for months.) If you can tie your research to something with “disaster” attached, you can get headlines and, hopefully, funding. Hence we see the Nuclear Winter, the Ozone Hole, Acid Rain, Global Warming, etc. And, as Jordan Peterson points out, it is in human nature to latch on to perceived issues that make you look like one of the popular crowd rather than working out real priorities in your own life. Hence we see people building statues to Greta Uglyface.