Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris (PDF)

Description

An essential book to understanding whether the new miracle cure is good science or simply too good to be true American taxpayers spend $30 billion annually funding biomedical research, but over half of these studies can’t be replicated due to poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Bad science doesn’t just hold back medical progress, it can sign the equivalent of a death sentence for terminal patients. In Rigor Mortis, Richard Harris explores these urgent issues with vivid anecdotes, personal stories, and interviews with the top biomedical researchers. We need to fix our dysfunctional biomedical system — before it’s too late.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review Named by Amazon as one of their “Best Nonfiction Books of the Month”Named one of PRI/SCIENCE FRIDAY’s “Best Science Books of 2017″”Rigor Mortis provides an excellent summation of the case for fixing science.”―SLATE”Harris makes a strong case that the biomedical research culture is seriously in need of repair.”―Nature”Rigor Mortis effectively illustrates what can happen when a convergence of social, cultural, and scientific forces…conspires to create a real crisis of confidence in the research process.”―Science”A rewarding read for anyone who wants to know the unvarnished truth about how science really gets done.”―Financial Times”Rigor Mortis effectively illustrates what can happen when a convergence of social, cultural, and scientific forces, as well as basic human motivation, conspires to create a real crisis of confidence in the research process.”―SCIENCE”Harris makes a strong case that the biomedical research culture is seriously in need of repair.”―Nature”Rigor Mortis is rife with examples of things that go awry in medical studies, how they happen, and how they can be avoided and fixed. For the most part, academic biomedical scientists are not evil, malicious, or liars at heart.”―Ars Technica”An alarming and highly readable summation of what has been called the ‘reproducibility crisis’ in science–the growing realization that large swathes of the biomedical literature may be wrong.”―Spectrum Magazine”This engaging book will inform and challenge readers who care about the public image of science, the state of peer review, and US funding for science.”―Physics Today “This behind-the-scenes look at biomedical research will appeal to students and academics. A larger audience of impacted patients and taxpayers will also find this critical review fascinating and alarming. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.”―Library Journal”[An] easy-reading but hard-hitting exposé…”―Kirkus”Just as ‘post-truth’ was selected as the word of the year in 2016 for its political connotations, Richard Harris masterfully shows how this pertains to science, too. Rigor Mortis is a compelling, sobering, and important account of bad biomedical research, and the pressing need to fix a broken culture.”―Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and author of The Patient Will See You Now”Science remains the best way to build knowledge and improve health, but as Richard Harris reminds us in Rigor Mortis, it is also carried out by humans subject to ‘publish or perish’ and other perverse incentives. Tapping into these tensions, Harris deftly weaves gripping tales of sleuthing with possible paths out of what some call a crisis. Read this book if you want to see how biomedical research is reviving itself.”―Ivan Oransky, Co-Founder of Retraction Watch and Distinguished Writer In Residence at New York University”Richard Harris’s elegant and compelling dissection of scientific research is must-reading for anyone seeking to understand today’s troubled research enterprise-and how to save it.” ―Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT”Richard Harris has written an essential guide to how scientific research may arrive at the wrong conclusions. From the 235 ways that scientists can fool themselves to the misuse of statistics and the persistence of unsound research methods, Harris outlines the problems underlying the so-called ‘reproducibility crisis’ in biomedical research and introduces readers to the people working on solutions.”―Christie Aschwanden, lead science writer for FiveThirtyEight and health columnist for the Washington Post About the Author Richard Harris is one of the nation’s most celebrated science journalists, covering science, medicine, and the environment for more than thirty years for NPR, and the three-time winner of the AAAS Science Journalism Award. He lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐(Quick review: Many biomedical scientists are already aware of the content of this book, but for academics in other fields, industry professionals, doctors, or people who plan to donate money to biomedical research, I highly recommend it.)Biomedical science is falling sway to the law of diminishing returns. These are no longer the days when new cures pop up out of nowhere during quick tests. Complex new technologies have opened up millions of new possibilities for discovering agents of disease or possible treatments, while creating countless new opportunities for failure in the process. In the 21st century, it is exponentially harder to find new drugs than it was in the 20th, and increasingly, young researchers around the world are feeling the grind.Luckily, science has all the tools of the Enlightenment at its disposal to expose mistaken research and weed out bad methods. There are regular conferences, internal reviews, retractions, and impeccable science journalism at the journals Nature and Science especially. The more exuberant apologists for science will tell us that unlike religious prophecy, science gains from failed predictions. So, is there really a problem?Richard Harris, NPR science reporter, argues in this book that yes, diminishing returns is creating real problems for science. This book reads like a long NPR story, so it would probably make a great audiobook, except that I wouldn’t recommend listening to it in the car: some of Harris’s findings would probably make you slam on the brakes. Despite the best intentions of hundreds of whistleblowers, and an institutional recognition that things need to change, much of the medical research funded by tax money and grieving parents is… well… a word that Harris refuses to put down on print.On a structural level, the stakes are very high. A researcher might spend a decade working based on false assumptions, or become widely known in his field for a lauded finding that might not be exactly true. And there is no prize for discovering that a result is false. Researchers may take months or years failing to reproduce a result, with the only reward being the ability to grumble about it at next year’s conference. Scientists are human and there are always little problems at the interpersonal level, but when those problems are well-known to everyone and seem unavoidable, they become part of the structure of science itself.The result is that there are a number of sacred cows that regularly spawn bad science, but which both academics and publishers have refused to abandon, resulting in the 70-90% rate of inaccuracy among published studies. The inexcusable becomes normal: there’s the overconfidence in mouse studies. There’s the sloppy use of cell lines, which is no longer tolerated in industry studies. There’s the infamous “p = 0.05” standard, which is well known by biostatisticians to be too loose, but which would slow biomedical publication to a near halt if it were abandoned. Researchers are evaluated on quantity of publications, rather than quality, during job interviews. Data sharing in biomedical science lags far behind other fields, due to intense competition for funding. Worst of all, research universities do not offer classes in methodology where problems like these might be discussed. Researchers trying to evaluate recent literature and get new results are forced to learn “on their feet,” either in the laboratory or at conferences.This is now recognized as a crisis throughout the field. In 2015 a discussion was opened as to how things might be improved. Unfortunately, besides closer attention to detail at the top journals, there is no consensus about what can be done. The hypercompetitive environment that promotes false results and sloppy standards relies on the same psychological drive that causes good researchers to seek out hidden methodological problems. The most frightening question is, in the long run, can these problems actually be fixed? At a structural level, the law of diminishing returns (called Eroom’s Law in the book) means that research is going to get more and more expensive — the possibilities may still be exciting, but institutions are going to pour more and more cash to complete any given study, and the desire for positive results is going to be more, not less. The import of this is that all of us, doctors and laypeople alike, will need to be more and more skeptical of research findings as time goes on.Although biomedical researchers may want to insist that this book is a compilation of challenges rather than fatal flaws, and that their research continues to save lives, any academic or journalist with a serious interest in the truth needs to read it, in order to understand how biological research in general operates today. When I, a humanities grad student, explained to my biomedical researcher friend the type of procedure that has been proposed by my colleagues for applying “cognitive science” to artistic behavior, he laughed out loud. When you know how modern science really works, and the vast number of pitfalls that might be hiding between the lines of any individual paper, the uses to which non-experts put your work can sound naive or even absurd. Harris is doing his duty as a journalist to put that variety of scientific intuition down in print.Related books:-

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⭐This important book is about the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research, i.e. the revelation that ~50% of current biomedical research is wrong!The root cause is simply that biology is FAR more complex than physics and chemistry. (Psychology+neurology in particular are fields, which are the most likely to have incorrect results because no one understands how the brain of an ant- let alone the human brain- works.) Because of that complexity, adequate models for experiments don’t exist- e.g. mice are poor substitutes for humans. Even if a mouse experiment is reproducible, it may actually be irrelevant for human health. Human cell lines also make poor models because cells behave differently in petri-dishes. Also, contamination of cell lines is so common that many results are completely invalid. Harris also describes how erroneous results may be due to processing samples under slightly different conditions (“batch” effect).Harris also notes that even if a result is “true” (reproducible and statistically significant), it may not matter for all practical purposes because the effect is tiny. (Scientists say a result is “significant” when it’s statistically detectable- which does NOT mean the effect is important.) This is probably the KEY point of the book, but unfortunately, Harris doesn’t expand enough on this theme:Imagine your lifetime risk of developing a certain cancer is 1% and eating red meat increases that risk by 30%- sounds scary, right? But is a 1.3% risk really something to worry about? Especially if the study is only an epidemiological study which can’t establish cause-and-effect (correlation is NOT causation) and may be completely invalid due to shoddy data/statistics/assumptions and bias (e.g. perhaps a hidden political agenda to reduce meat consumption in order to supposedly combat global warming). On the other hand, suppose that smoking increases that risk by a factor of 8x from 1% -> 8%. That’s a medium-size effect, which might certainly justify changing your lifestyle.All scientists dream of making a novel discovery that has a big/medium-size effect. Instead we’re now increasingly being inundated with reports of useless, tiny effects, which just confuse and confound everyone and may be completely invalid due to errors and bad assumptions. E.g., genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have linked neurological disorders like autism to hundreds of different genes but the effect of each gene is minuscule. (Perhaps this is a sign that scientists are on the wrong track and other factors are more relevant than genes.) It’s now known that only 2% of the human genome consists of genes, which code proteins, and the rest is either junk DNA or involved somehow in gene-regulation. So despite all of the undeniable progress of the past few decades, the genome remains barely understood.Over the past 40 years, there’s been little to no progress in treating conditions like depression, ALS, schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer’s and cancer (with the notable exception of the new class of cancer immunity drugs). Harris also notes that drug development has dramatically slowed down since the 1950s (because most of the low-hanging fruit has already been discovered) and could even end by 2040 per “Eroom’s Law”. And this is despite the unprecedented numbers of scientists working today.Harris is an optimist and believes the reproducibility problem is one of the key factors in this lack of progress and the scientific community can reform itself. A pessimist, though, could argue the reproducibiliy crisis is really a sign -NOT of sloppy science per se- but of the diminishing returns of scientific investment- not because there’s not more to discover, of course, but because the remaining “fruit” is too difficult to reach and may even be beyond human comprehension. We live in an age of tech-hype (nanotech, AI, self-driving cars, quantum computing, CRISPR, etc.), but in reality, with the end of Moore’s Law, the golden age of technological progress and discovery may be ending as well.Related reading: Lost in Math, The End of Science, Snowball in a Blizzard.

⭐Based on the information presented in this book, the scientific research campaign to cure cancer and various other terrible diseases is not going as well as one would hope. The author explores the nature of this problem and in a fair amount of detail. Non-reproducible results of experiments published the scientific literature is a particular concern. One of the major reasons for this that the author has uncovered is sloppy laboratory habits brought on, in part, due to pressure to publish as soon as possible at the expense of careful laboratory work and proper data analysis. This attitude exists for several reasons, including advancing scientists’ reputations/careers as well as obtaining further funding for more projects. It’s felt that a large number of publications looks better than few even if these latter ones are of much better quality. The author also discusses ongoing efforts towards resolving this problem and has succeeded, I believe, in giving a well-balanced presentation.I found the book to be well-written in a prose that is clear, serious, detailed, lively and engaging. I also found the information in this book to be rather disappointing, worrisome and at times heartbreaking as well as frightening. This is a book that should be of interest to everyone.

⭐A thorough critical review and analysis of the validity of modern medical approaches. It is a frightening book that you should avoid reading before your next doctor’s appointment, for who needs to know that of the 53 exciting original oncological studies that interested him, Begley could replicate only 6 (yes six) out of 53, and that Ioannidis said that half (yes, 50%) of the medical literature is false. The depth of this investigation is breathtaking, The drawback, a surfeit of examples, is easily overcome with a quick clicking of the mouse when indicated.

⭐This is a very informative book about bad scientific practice. Its written by a journalist, so it contains many stories and not as much explanation/theory. But the stories sure are significant and very informatively written, I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in the topic.

⭐L’ouvrage de Richard Harris part d’un constat indubitable sur la recherche médicale d’aujourd’hui, encore largement inconnu du grand public : non-reproductibilité de trop de résultats parus dans les revues savantes, ralentissement marquée de l’apparition de médicaments efficaces vraiment nouveaux. Son analyse pâtit du mélange entre les pressions de la << big science >>, qui exacerbe la compétition entre un nombre croissant de chercheurs à travers le monde, dans un environnement financier moins favorable qu’auparavant, et de véritables butées scientifiques, mal maîtrisées. Deux exemples, issues du livre : l’élevage des souris, principaux animaux de laboratoire, et la culture des cellules posent des problèmes redoutables, insoupçonnés il y a peu. Trop facile d’écrire un pamphlet journalistique à propos de la médecine car la vie humaine y est en jeu. Comprendre la pratique de la science actuelle, médicale ou non, est une exigence fondamentale, insuffisamment développée. Je crains que ce travail superficiel n’y aide guère. En français, << La science à bout de souffle ? >>, par Laurent Ségalat (Seuil, 2009), est très supérieur.

⭐

⭐A great summary of how society and scientists behave unscientifically. Fantastic!

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