In a curious move just ahead of the peaceful transition of power we are promised in this, Our Sacred Democracy™, which will usher in a new sheriff in town who has promised to go after the perpetrators of The Science™ and clean up the hideous merger of corporations and state that has characterized the NIH for decades at this point, the agency is promising to “repeat the work” it’s published going back years in order “to make sure it’s solid.”
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Via Science.org (emphasis added):
Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made an unusual offer to many of its 37,500 principal investigators: If you have a laboratory study you think could have a major impact on health—such as a mouse experiment testing a possible heart disease drug—we may pay for a contract lab to repeat the work to make sure it’s solid.
Only a few people applied to the pilot phase of NIH’s initiative, which is finalizing its picks for the first handful of studies this month. But its leader at NIH says it has enough participants to study the feasibility of the program, which has the support of Congress and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head NIH, Stanford University health economist Jay Bhattacharya. He recently told The Wall Street Journal that replication studies should be “a centerpiece of what the NIH does.”
The initiative comes with a big caveat: The agency has no plans to make the resulting data public*. That “limits the appeal and value,” says Tim Errington of the Center for Open Science (COS), a nonprofit that supports replication studies. Still, he says, the pilot “is a step in the right direction.”
*In what world is a publicly-funded agency like the NIH allowed to hide publicly-funded research from the public that would potentially expose its malfeasance — and this from the Most Transparent Administration in History™?
Color me cynical, but, as I may have betrayed previously, I harbor some doubts that the NIH is sincere about its recent promotion via lapdog media outlets like Science.org of a program to “double-check” its pseudoscience — conveniently timed, again, for the takeover of the agency by Trump-appointed avowed reformist Jay Bhattacharya.
Continuing:
For years, concerns have mounted that many basic biomedical experiments don’t hold up when another lab attempts them, casting doubt on plans to translate the work into a treatment. Cases of apparent scientific fraud, such as work underlying Alzheimer’s disease drugs that Science investigated, have added to worries about the integrity of these preclinical studies.
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I might be a bit too jaded to see straight these days, but to my mind this looks an awful lot like your classic CYA operation to clean up the books and demonstrate some proactivity before your decades-long scam of using Big Pharma-funded, rigged studies to approve dubious pharmaceutical drugs and then take your cut through sleazy kickback schemes and hushed promises of future employment in the industry you’re supposed to regulate comes to light, as all dirty deeds inevitably do.
Or maybe the NIH is, all of a sudden, packed to the hilt with honest-to-God public servants with a New Year’s Resolution to right past wrongs.
You decide.
