Trial in Error: How the economic imperatives of academia and biomedical journals are leading to a flood of junk science.

• Author: Brownlee, Shannon
• Position: ON POLITICAL BOOKS - Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions - Book review

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions

by Richard Harris

Basic Books, 288 pp.

In 2014, a fund-raising gimmick involving dumping a bucket of ice water over somebody's head raised $100 million toward research to conquer amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Often known as Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS is a devastating neurological illness that paralyzes the patient inch by inch, until the person can no longer speak, swallow, or breathe. Most people with ALS live less than two years after diagnosis.

The outpouring of generosity triggered by the ice bucket challenge was impressive. But it might have been dampened if donors had known an unpleasant fact about the research they were funding: one reason we don't already have any effective treatment, much less a cure, is that ALS drug research has been done exceedingly poorly. In 2010, researchers at the ALS Therapy Development Institute, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched a review of the animal experiments that serve as the basis for candidate drugs. Every single study had used too few mice to get a valid result. Some studies used as few as four mice. Four. Often, the researchers hadn't had enough funding to use more mice. But regardless of the reason, when the institute conducted the same studies with enough mice, all the drugs failed to show a real effect--meaning that donors and funders, including drug companies and the federal government, had spent tens of millions of dollars on trials involving human ALS patients on the basis of spurious animal results.

This problem of "reproducibility" of scientific results, also known as "research waste," has begun to get some attention in both academic circles and the press, as more and more experiment results taken at face value have turned out to be false when subjected to retesting. The crisis is not so much a shortcoming of the scientific method itself, as some have suggested, but more that scientists aren't adhering to it. Poorly designed and analyzed research is infecting the biomedical literature, causing other researchers to try to build on results that are the data equivalent of a house of cards.

Biomedical research is a $240 billion annual global endeavor. The United States is the biggest funder, with $70 billion in commercial spending and another $40 billion from nonprofits and government, mostly the National Institutes of Health. We are rightly known as the greatest research engine in the world. American labs are a wellspring of drugs and biologies that have eased suffering...