Re:A prospective Alzheimer’s trial reports
by vikramkr on Monday February 10, 2020 @04:48PM
(#22293754)
ON the other hand, those methods of collecting large amounts of high quality data might only seem promising because they're effectively just ways to run thousands or millions of gels at once before picking out the ones that "look right." The fundamental incentives to not publish null results and to publish or perish haven't disappeared. It's not that people aren't capable of running high quality, reproducible experiments, or that the tools aren't there, it's just that people need to publish to advance in their careers. These new high throughput screens get your quick publications and let you overfit models to the data you collect, and it might seem like a transformation now, but if people weren't incentivized to spend a couple hundred bucks to replicate a gel in the past, do you think they'll actually be incentivized to spend thousands of dollars and computation time to try and replicate screens and the models derived from them?
Re:A prospective Alzheimer’s trial reports
by killjoywashere on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @02:57AM
(#22296858)
I gave a talk on basic bioinformatics algorithms to my pathologist colleagues once, explaining that it all amounts to collections of good guesses and you really need to know how this was done before you believe it. They just sat there, waited for the lecture to end, and went back to their jobs, accepting whatever the molecular labs were telling them that week. They simply have no mechanism to push back except to play gatekeeper, and they can't even be an informed gatekeeper.
Failed experiments in biology don't make much progress compared to failed experiments in physics. beyond the inability to control for wide range of variables that are normally managed in physics, most people in biology aren't good at running high quality, reproducible experiments that falsify hypothesis. I have seen many coworkers run the same exact gel over and over until they get one that "looks like what they were expecting". I don't see the same level of experimental inadequacy in physics.
The best approaches in biology now seem to throw away the idea that we can construct a rational narrative to explain the biology that causes a complex disease, and more on collecting very large amounts of high quality data to produce sophisticated statistical models that deal with the underlying complexity in a useful way.