3 ms·
> It’s not Big Pharma that’s responsible for most retractions This is not at all surprising to me. Big Pharma has teams of professional statisticians, writers,
by bkandel 6y ago
> It’s not Big Pharma that’s responsible for most retractions
This is not at all surprising to me. Big Pharma has teams of professional statisticians, writers, copy-editors, fact-checkers, etc. and have much more rigorously enforced standards than most academic research institutions. Their bias comes out more in how they frame the study and in the choice of things they study, but I think in general I would trust Big Pharma to be more accurate in reporting their study results than academic labs.
- yummypaint 6y agoEnjoy your thalidomide. Pharma has absolutely no intrinsic interest in scientific integrity or integrity in general. They exist solely to make money, and any cultivated appearance of good will is exactly that. They gobble up scientific talent as a means to that end, but R&D will always be a cost center for them. I would argue the massive profit-driven incentives to reach certain results are more insidious than a small research group nearing the end of a grant cycle. Given the historical context, it seems more likely that pharma is just better at concealing misconduct.
- bkandel 6y agoI don't think we're disagreeing, and I agree that profits rather than human benefit drive pharma's research agenda. I'm just saying that if a paper from Big Pharma says a factual statement like "Reference X says Y" or "X% of patients had blood pressure of Y", I would expect Big Pharma research teams to have done a thorough job of checking to make sure they got it right.