What about "industrial" trans-fats? Could they be "good" also? The article states, "Although there is a large body of research confirming the detrimental effects of industrial trans-fats, research into natural trans-fats has not shown such outcomes."
One research for this may be the well-known bias in food health literature. If researchers believe industrial trans-fats are bad, only articles that say such things will be published, because anything with results to the contrary will be assumed to contain some unidentified methodological flaw. Also, scientific journals don't like to published studies simply replicating other studies, and so the replications discrediting another study go unnoticed.
For readers surprised at this accusation of science, they have a lot to learn about science! See the following quotes for demonstration.
Every single
time they've had a hypothesis of causation from their data that was tested in a
clinical trial; without exception the trial failed to confirm the hypothesis.
Doesn't mean the hypothesis wasn't true; but the trial found the opposite...So
if you like the hypothesis, that one is not reliable; and if you don't like it,
the other one is not reliable. Exactly. And literally the investigators who did
that Minnesota study—it was finished by 1973 and it was published in 1988 or
1989, which was a year after the principal investigator retired. And I am a
journalist and I tracked him down and I asked him: Why did you wait 16 years to
publish? And he said: Because we didn't like the way it turned out. A moment of
honesty. The assumption is if you don't get the answer you expect, you did the
experiment wrong. And that is still the case today.
—Gary
Taubes. November 21, 2011. Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar, and Scientific
Discovery. EconTalk.org.
Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release
but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new,
exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially
when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file
drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are
some experiments that everyone knows don't replicate, but this knowledge
doesn't get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can
be chilling, he adds. “I've seen students spending their entire PhD period
trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they
had nothing to show for their time.”
—Yong, Ed. May 16, 2012.
“Replication studies: Bad copy.” Nature.
News Feature. 485(7398).
His conclusion is widely
upheld by other scientists: Just because two events are statistically
associated in a study, it doesn't mean that one necessarily sets off the other.
What is merely suggestive can be mistaken as causal.
That partly explains why observational studies in general can be
replicated only 20% of the time, versus 80% for large, well-designed randomly controlled
trials, says Dr. Ioannidis. Dr. Young, meanwhile, pegs the replication rate for
observational data at an even lower 5% to 10%.
—Gautam
Naik. May 3, 2012. “Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists.” The
Wall Street Journal. A1.
Nearly 80,000 observational
studies were published in the period 1990-2000 across all scientific fields,
according to an analysis performed for The Wall Street Journal by Thomson
Reuters. In the following period, 2001-2011, the number of studies more than
tripled to 263,557, based on a search of Thomson Reuters Web of Science, an
index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals world-wide. The analysis likely doesn't
capture every observational study in the literature, but it does indicate a
pattern of growth over time.
—Gautam
Naik. May 3, 2012. “Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists.” The
Wall Street Journal. A1.
A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that
many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs —
are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the
future.
During a decade as head of global cancer
research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark”
publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to
reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on
them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described
his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal
Nature.
…
Other scientists worry that something less innocuous
explains the lack of reproducibility.
Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies,
Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one
of the problematic studies.
“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,”
said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never
got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once,
but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very
disillusioning.”
—Sharon
Begley. March 28, 2012. “In cancer science, many ‘discoveries’ don’t
hold up.” Reuters.
Our submission was rejected
without being sent for peer review on the basis that the journal has a policy
of not publishing replications.
—Chris French,
on why his article showing ESP doesn’t exist, an article replicating a previous
study showing ESP does exist, was not published in the same journal. An illustration of why this journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
should not consider itself scientific.
Within parapsychology, there is a
tendency to accept any positive replications but to dismiss failures to
replicate if the procedures followed have not been exactly duplicated.
—Chris French,
on why his article showing ESP doesn’t exist, an article replicating a previous
study showing ESP does exist, was not published in the same journal. An illustration of why many “scientific” journal should not consider itself
scientific.
—Tyler Cowen
On September 12, 1957, Vicary called a press conference to announce
the results of an unusual experiment.
Over the course of six weeks during the preceding summer, he had
arranged to have slogans—specifically, “Eat popcorn” and “Drink
Coca-Cola”—flashed for three milliseconds, every five seconds, onto a movie
screen…the messages had increased soda sales at the theater by 18 percent and
popcorn sales by 58 percent.
The public reacted with fury…
There was a glitch, however.
Researchers tried to replicate Vicary’s findings…but none
succeeded. After five years Vicary
confessed that his so-called experiment was “a gimmick.”
—Stroebe,
Wolfgang. May/June, 2012. “The Subtle Power of Hidden Messages.” Scientific
American Mind.
...he had been
on on virtually everything he had done. But he'd just about demonstrated how he
could move up to the very top of his field by claiming a discovery and then
kind of moving on to the next experiment and leaving better scientists to clean
up the mess after him. And this has been a common theme in everything I've
written about. In making declarative pronouncements based on preliminary data,
and fighting viciously to get people to believe in you, you can do very well for
yourself in these careers. Nobody moves forward by spending their career
checking other people's work to see if it was right or not. And actually one of
my favorite lines from physics was from this Nobel Prize winner Sam Ting at
MIT, who said to me, if I can get this right: To be first and right is good; to
be first and wrong is not so good; and to be second and right is meaningless.
—Gary
Taubes. November 21, 2011. Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar, and Scientific
Discovery. EconTalk.org.
20
Things You Didn’t Know About…Science Fraud: The geniuses who fudged data, the
cheaters who did it in plain sight, and the frauds who got away with it.
1
What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral
ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of
18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent ’fessed up to falsifying or
manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had.
2
After studying retracted biology papers published between
2000 and 2010, neurobiologist R. Grant
Steen claimed that Americans were significantly more
prone to commit fraud than scientists from other nations.
3
But when two curious bloggers reanalyzed
Steen’s data, they found that American’s aren’t so shifty after all.
4 Chinese
scientists were actually three times as likely as Americans to commit fraud.
(French researchers were least likely to misbehave.)
5 If
caught stealing someone else’s ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a
person can experience a memory as a new, original thought.
6
But there’s no shortage of excuses. In the 1970s the FDA
investigated Francois Savery, a doctor who submitted identical data to two drug
companies, claiming that they were from two different studies. When confronted,
he explained that he was forced to re-create his data sets because he took the
original research with him on a lake picnic and lost it when his rowboat
capsized.
7
Government authorities later learned that Savery never
conducted the studies in the first place—or received a medical degree.
8 Even
geniuses succumb to temptation. Researchers have found that Isaac Newton fudged
numbers in his Principia,
generally considered the greatest physics text ever written.
9
Other legends who seem to have altered data: Freud, Darwin,
and Pasteur.
10
And Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s famous pea-breeding
experiments—the foundation of modern ideas of heredity—are suspiciously good,
matching his theory of genetic inheritance a little too well.
11
One of the most notorious scientific hoaxes remains
unsolved. Someone mixed human and orangutan bones, treated them, and planted
them to create Piltdown Man, a “missing link”
between humans and apes found in 1912. But who?
12 Science
historian Richard Milner accuses Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who also fabricated
Sherlock Holmes. Doyle lived near the Piltdown site and resented the scientific
community for mocking his belief in spiritualism. Opportunity and motive.
Elementary!
13 In
1974 immunologist William Summerlin created a sensation when he claimed to have
transplanted tissue from black to white mice. In reality, he used a black
felt-tip pen to darken patches of fur on white mice.
14 Some
researchers still use “painting the mice” to describe scientific fraud.
15 Painting
the mice can have serious consequences. In the 1980s, psychologist Stephen
Breuning published results from fictitious “trials” of tranquilizers; his
findings informed the clinical practices for treating mentally retarded
children.
16 Have
you no subtlety, sir? In 1981 John Darsee, a rising-star cardiologist at
Harvard, faked log entries in a canine heart study in full view of his
colleagues.
17 Although
many of his papers were later found to have false data, Darsee continued to be cited positively for years (pdf).
18
Write what you know: Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc
Hauser resigned last year after he was found guilty of eight counts of
scientific misconduct. Now he’s working on a book, reportedly titled Evilicious:
Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.
19
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of
Research Integrity estimates there are 2,300 cases of misconduct among
NIH-funded researchers each year.
20 A
role-playing game on the office’s website, called “The Lab: Avoiding Research
Misconduct,” has been downloaded 26,000 times since it launched last year.
(Try testing your own moral compass
here.)
—Eric A. Powell.
“20 Things You Didn’t Know
About…Science Fraud.” May 8, 2012. Discover
Magazine. Health and Medicine.
