It was nice to have the break between semesters to read things I wanted to read. This is an article entitled "The Truth Wears Off" from the New Yorker by Jonah Leher. It was published a few weeks ago about a phenomenon occurring with scientific studies on drugs, psychology and even acupuncture, and how when later replicated the results were disturbingly diminished. The studies were legitimate, peer reviewed and confirmed by other researchers. However, the effects were not nearly as impressive when reviewed after further studies. Its an interesting look at how complex it is to perform studies; randomness and bias creep in when even rigorous standards are used. I suppose what is disappointing to many of us who have a belief in the scientific process is that our current expectations are wrong. The expectation was that our published studies are valid and that we have solved a pieces of the puzzle and can move on to the next piece.
We must be reminded that it is a process. We study something; we have a theory of why it behaves the way it does; we set up a test to prove or disprove. Then, we have others evaluate the study as well as try to disprove with their own tests. Our time horizon just needs to be expanded to include further testing to obtain larger data sets as well as to further ferret out our own hopes (i.e. bias) for a result. Remember the adage that if you torture data long enough it will tell you anything. We get in such a hurry in our world of immediate gratification that we expect the same thing from science. It just is not so and we will have to wait and see.
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