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The article mentions that there are two drugs that resulted from this research. One of them failed a trial recently. Nobody knows if this fraud means that the d
by matthewdgreen 2y ago
The article mentions that there are two drugs that resulted from this research. One of them failed a trial recently. Nobody knows if this fraud means that the drug never could have worked, or if this was just bad luck. So yes: people do measure real-world impact. It's just that it takes a very long time and there are plenty of confounding factors, since even non-fraudulent drug research can fail.
- mike_hearn 2y agoThat's true for the rare case that something turns into a professionally run and controlled trial (incidentally there's evidence for many published clinical trials also being fake). But very little research output is ever tested that way. Most doesn't even claim it could have real world impact in principle.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoWhat you're observing is that most research results don't have much impact. The ones that get replicated are definitionally the ones that matter the most, since they lead to controlled trials. In principle this is a pretty reasonable way to allocate limited resources.