[HN Gopher] How life sciences work: Findings of a year-long inve...
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How life sciences work: Findings of a year-long investigation
(2019)
Author : johndcook
Score : 44 points
Date : 2022-01-16 12:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (guzey.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (guzey.com)
| nosianu wrote:
| I looked at other articles on that author's site and found a
| topic that was discussed here more than once that I would be
| interested in hearing opinions about:
|
| https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
|
| The title is "Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with
| Scientific and Factual Errors" and the contents is piece by piece
| refuting that book.
|
| Checking google, it was discussed on HN actually:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
|
| and in this sub-thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21792342
|
| Quite a few other potentially interesting links, even if only to
| check some things more deeply. Also,
| https://guzey.com/fiction/hntop1/ ("How I got to #1 spot on
| Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same")
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| I found his comments about giving up sex a little weird on the
| last article.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "There were always large parts of science that were wrong or
| meaningless, so the present situation is not worse than the past
| in this respect.
|
| Even if 10-50% of the studies I mentioned in the first section
| turn out to be wrong, the pace of correct and important results
| is still astounding."
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| >I am confident that somewhere between 10% and 50% of papers
| published in good journals are wrong, meaningless or fraudulent.
|
| This is entirely unsurprising to me. On top of this, reporters
| will see something interesting in a big name journal and report
| on it yet that usually adds a whole 'nother layer of
| incorrectness that the general public picks up as "fact"
| hammock wrote:
| I'm concerned by #3 "Nothing works the way you would naively
| think it works (for better and for worse)" which seems to imply
| that all or most of life sciences is funded by the NIH. What % of
| life sciences funding comes from the NIH and what are the other
| big sources?
| dekhn wrote:
| In the US the NIH funds the vast majority of life sciences
| ($30B/year), but NSF, DOD(IIRC at least a billion a year each),
| and private institutions also provide life sciences funding
| (several more billions). NIH definitely is the big gorilla,
| many young investigators are trying to get established by
| getting R01s and using them to publish papers at the start of
| their career.
| panabee wrote:
| the NIH is awesome. we owe those civil servants a debt of
| gratitude for sacrificing higher compensation in industry and
| performing as well as they do given the constraints.
|
| breakthrough ideas typically come from unconventional ideas,
| i.e., risky ideas or ideas likely to fail -- and thus waste
| taxpayer money.
|
| yet the funding process is mostly about conforming to
| traditional assumptions, which naturally gates scientific
| breakthroughs.
|
| the problem lies upstream. politicians don't allow the NIH to
| fund risky research and waste money.
| trhway wrote:
| >politicians don't allow the NIH to fund risky research
|
| how about NIH funding those gain-of-function coronavirus
| experiments (which included human testing) in Wuhan? And
| when DARPA refused to fund as too risky the additional
| human targeting coronavirus genetic manipulations in Wuhan,
| it was NIAID (led by Dr. Fauci - the top politician in life
| sciences today) which funded it.
| hammock wrote:
| Fascinating. I guess I am surprised because I had thought of
| NIH as focused on human/public health, and there is so much
| to life sciences that is non-human. I would have thought
| there would be more major sources of funding. For example,
| something around ag science.
| simplestats wrote:
| The NSF funds basic science, including life sciences. NIH
| targets diseases. (and the NSF or NIH will not fund
| something if it better fits under the other) I certainly
| think it's a valuable thing to have a federal agency doing.
| If you want more basic life science, funding this area in
| the NSF more would be the way it's done in the system we
| have today. NIH has the cancer institute and the institute
| of mental health and so on. It is therefore really the
| domain of physicians. They want a path through mouse (or
| whatever) then human clinical studies, and want to see
| doctors as co-PI's.
|
| The fact that this careful practical system still pumps out
| so much bs is very problematic. I think it's the same
| problem as other research areas, not the fault of the NIH
| system itself.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The vast majority of life sciences _is_ funded by NIH. This is
| one reason why the nonstop "revelations" of crazy projects
| funded by _gasp_ Anthony Fauci are really meaningless. NIH
| doles out an enormous bucket of cash year after year for all
| sorts of research.
| hammock wrote:
| >the nonstop "revelations" of crazy projects funded by gasp
| Anthony Fauci are really meaningless
|
| I'm not really aware of any of those other than the gain of
| function research on bat coronaviruses by EcoHealth Alliance,
| which was only controversial beacause Fauci denied it in
| front of Congress and was technically not supposed to happen
| due to Obama's moratorium. What are the other revelations are
| you talking about?
| dnautics wrote:
| Not gp, but there was another one that made the rounds
| about dogs being subjected to being bitten by desert
| insects. Iirc It turned out that this wasn't funded by the
| nih?
| dnautics wrote:
| Well for one, if anyone says "they weren't funded for X grant,
| so it didn't happen", it's implicitly encodes the idea that
| people _don 't_ do research before they get the grant money.
| They do.
| j7ake wrote:
| Nice article. I love hearing podcasts with scientists as guests
| (eg Boyden quote on expansion microscopy).
|
| Even better is when the hosts are themselves working scientists.
|
| Recently I got really into this podcast by Itai Yanai and Martin
| Lercher that tries to find how scientists navigate "day science"
| (eg formal papers and grants) vs "night science" (mucking about
| in the lab). Highly recommend if one wants to hear discussions by
| biological scientists talking about creativity.
|
| Check out "Night Science".
| dnautics wrote:
| having been there (last was in the fray 7 years ago now... geeze
| time flies) here are my thoughts:
|
| 1. These are all technological developments, not scientific
| developments. Even MRNA-vaccines leading edge stuff was being
| built when I was in grad school (20 years ago). So judging by
| what technical developments are coming out now, may be a lagging
| indicator on science.
|
| 2-1: Absolutely correct. Out of 10 years in science I only did 1
| "officially on what we were funded to do". The other nine were on
| sneakily independent shit, or on fully independent (hard money)
| experiments.
|
| 2-2: No comment either way, have no experience with 'methods
| development' at least in the sense that he's talking about.
|
| 2-3: correct in the short term but wrong in the long term. If you
| are foolish enough to be a postdoc that puts everything into the
| science, you won't get promoted, so your track record of being a
| good scientist ends on the vine.
|
| 3. Correct in the short term but wrong in the long. I did exactly
| this but couldn't keep going because being a postdoc was terminal
| for me.
|
| 4. Correct. I tick off at least four of these bullets, including
| "unwelcome demographics".
|
| 5-12. All correct, without much else to add. Well said!
|
| The biggest problem in sciences (biological) in the US is that we
| let the good quality scientists burn out and quit, and those who
| advance are mostly people who are playing the game (with a
| negative selection for those who are actually good scientists,
| because playing the game is so competitive at this point that it
| burns time effort and brainspace). This is a leadership defect.
| We don't give professors instructions on how to groom, including
| putting time, effort, and political capital into their grad
| students and postdocs to become lab leaders in their own right
| (if that is what they want)
|
| One thing that the author does not (and cannot) address is deep
| knowledge, or thinking about things from first principles, a la
| feynman or musk. I think as we have more and more
| interdisciplinary scientists jumping in at the interdisciplinary
| level, we're already in an era where diletanttery (especially in
| trendy science mashups like biophysics) is high. This will
| further dilute expertise and make it hard to separate the wheat
| from the lemons. Once had a coworker grad student think you could
| drop a bacterial plasmid into a mammalian cell and get protein
| expression. I told him I would do it for him, but "I did not
| think that would work". He then confidently reported a positive
| observation (which, thank god, did not make it into any sort of
| publication). Dude is now a associate professor of genome
| sciences at university of washington.
| amirkdv wrote:
| > _as we have more and more interdisciplinary scientists
| jumping in at the interdisciplinary level, we 're already in an
| era where diletanttery (especially in trendy science mashups
| like biophysics) is high_
|
| Once heard a bioinformatics (CS) PhD candidate say "natural
| selection would remove a region of the genome if it didn't have
| biological function". They graduated with a thesis having to do
| with genome evolution.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>>> 1. These are all technological developments, not
| scientific developments. Even MRNA-vaccines leading edge stuff
| was being built when I was in grad school (20 years ago). So
| judging by what technical developments are coming out now, may
| be a lagging indicator on science.
|
| I'm not a life scientist, but a physicist developing scientific
| equipment. My impression is that every branch of "science" has
| a technological side, to an extent that varies from one branch
| to another. Making and testing new therapies has been
| undertaken under the umbrella of life science for a long time.
| I think one reason is that the same "hands" that are good at
| doing the basic science work are also needed for technology
| work in those fields.
|
| Another is that the underlying science isn't robust enough to
| expect a scientific development to be handed off to an
| engineering department without needing to learn more science
| along the way.
|
| It's not like physics, where a mainstream engineer working on a
| technology is highly unlikely to discover gaps in physics
| theory.
| dnautics wrote:
| I think the "biology gonna biology" is often a bit
| overplayed. A friend of mine was a high level manager at a
| certain petrochem's biotech arm and they ran into a
| bottleneck that was erratic. My friend kept saying "hey guys
| it's probably this" but they refused to listen to her and
| they went on a year long saga to search for the problem,
| including a full DOE (design of experiments) analysis. It
| turned out she was right. And thn the petrochemical company
| lost a major lawsuit about an accident they had caused and so
| they didn't need a green washing campaign anymore, and the
| department was shuttered.
| panabee wrote:
| 2-1 is fascinating. thanks for sharing.
|
| what percentage of grant budgets "pad" for unofficial research,
| in your opinion?
|
| this implies actual research could cost less and be allocated
| in smaller chunks if we tolerated higher risk and funded
| scientists more liberally.
|
| decomposing the funding process into smaller "functions" would
| offer several benefits over the current model of one monolithic
| grant.
| strikingloo wrote:
| After this, Guzey went on to work on the NGO [New
| Science](https://newscience.org/)
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