Research + Details = The Devil ?

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:34:30 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: This article really does not surprise me. I work in the research world and it's very hard to get people to do clean work. You can trust people with themselves only so far. After that you take your chances.
Unfortunately researches are often so focused on their own ideas that they sacrifice good methods for their own arrogance.
I will say that while sloppy methods are a problem I don't think that most published findings are wrong, maybe a little off, but not wrong. Of course this might depend on what field of research they are specifically talking about.

Clip Source: science.slashdot.org

"The Wall Street Journal has a sobering piece describing the research of medical scholar John Ioannidis, who showed that in many peer-reviewed research papers 'most published research findings are wrong.' The article continues: 'These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. [...] To root out mistakes, scientists rely on each other to be vigilant. Even so, findings too rarely are checked by others or independently replicated. Retractions, while more common, are still relatively infrequent. Findings that have been refuted can linger in the scientific literature for years to be cited unwittingly by other researchers, compounding the errors.'"

Tags: science, research, journals

Life Imitating Art, Reversing Fragile X Syndrome

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:01:53 GMT

clipped by: kidora
clipper's remarks: How wonderful is this.
While this does not directly translate into a cure for fragile x it does give hope that future breakthroughs will leads us closer to a workable therapy for this disease.
Thumbs-up to the researchers at M.I.T.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

In a case of life imitating art, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) reported today that they had successfully reversed mental retardation in mice, just as scientists did in the classic 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon. In the book by Daniel Keyes, scientists use experimental surgery—first tested on a mouse named Algernon—to dramatically boost the intelligence of a mentally retarded janitor named Charlie Gordon. Now M.I.T. scientists report in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences USA that they ameliorated brain damage in mice caused by a genetic disorder known as fragile X syndrome by blocking an enzyme involved in cellular development.

Tags: science, research

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Research + Details = The Devil ?

Life Imitating Art, Reversing Fragile X Syndrome