Thousands of Breast Cancer Studies are Totally Bogus, Warns Science Writer and Author of New Book
- Thousands of Breast Cancer Studies are Totally Bogus, Warns Science Writer and Author of New Book
by Vicki Batts, http://www.naturalnews.com/
(Natural News) NPR science correspondent and author of the new book,“Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions,” Richard Harris has shined a light on the many issues that plague the world of scientific research — and he’s exposed a dark industry secret: Many studies are actually totally worthless junk. According to Harris, thousands of breast cancer studies are totally useless because they were conducted using the wrong type of cells. Rather than using breast cancer cells, researchers had been using wrongly identified cells that were actually melanoma cancer cells — meaning thousands of papers had investigated and experimented with the wrong disease.
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“It’s impossible to know how much this sloppy use of the wrong cells has set back research into breast cancer,” Harris stated. But breast cancer studies are not the only ones that are affected by this dilemma — virtually every area of scientific research is plagued by the malady of junk studies with findings that cannot be replicated.
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The issue of misidentified and contaminated cancer cells in cancer research is a fairly well-known problem. Even back in 2012, researchers from the University of Colorado Cancer Center found that the high rate of contamination or mistaken identity of cancer cells indicated that many researchers are likely drawing faulty conclusions about their research. And certainly, the problem had been an ongoing issue by that point in time. Senior author Andrew Bradford, Ph.D., commented, “In the past, the technology to check cell lines didn’t exist and so you can’t really blame past researchers. But today it’s cheap, it’s easy and the technology is widely available. There’s no excuse to experiment on cells without first discovering what you’re experimenting on.”
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Given the sheer volume of scientific research that is conducted and published, it’s not unexpected that some might be faulty. But, in today’s world, it seems that research is constantly at odds with itself: As soon as one finding is published, another contradicts it. In the scientific community, this junk research phenomenon even has its own name: “The reproducibility crisis.”
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