From Slate: Why more rigor in science might do more harm than good
From Daniel Engber, reviewing Richard Harris’s Rigor Mortis at Slate: Rigor may not always serve the public good. In biomedicine, everyone is looking for positive results—meaningful, affirmative experiments that could one day help support a novel treatment for disease. (That’s true both for scientists who study biomedicine at universities and those employed by giant pharmaceutical companies.) In that context, rigor serves to check scientists’ ambition and enthusiasm: It reins in their wild oversteps and helps to keep experiments on track. But not every field of research enjoys the same harmony of goals. In the sciences most relevant to policy and regulation—such as climatology, toxicology, and nutrition—academics’ focus on making new discoveries is counterbalanced by another group of researchers, funded by Read More ›