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David Lamson's avatar

Wow, this post covers a lot of ground, thanks, Jamie.

One major step toward achieving Science 2.0 is what you and others are currently doing, and that is to correct the public's misperceptions regarding the nature of "disease" and its causes.

The great bulk of Science 1.0 experimentation that is done is based on flawed and incorrect disease model premises. And is unnecessary.

If the NIH and Big Pharma were to close their doors, would overall human (and animal) health improve?

When working in Big Pharma, we received daily corporate propaganda newsletters- my impression from those was that if our sales force didn't bribe doctors (the actual "customers" of Big Pharma) with free samples, and get government subsidies for our products (e.g. Medicare/Medicaid,) we would go out of business, because our products did not offer a benefit that people would willingly pay for.

On R&D, yes, one great surprise upon entering Big Pharma after 15 yrs in academic research, was discovering that Big Pharma had no R&D, but, instead, relied almost entirely on published results from publicly funded scientific research (mostly NIH.)

On reproducibility, when tested, the percentage of scientific project results that were reproducible (a critical aspect of science- what good is a recipe that turns out different each time,) was in the mid-teens for projects published in high impact journals (in other words, supposedly the best experiments.) I've worked with many good scientists, but a great many more who were not.

But the greater problem is not personnel, but it is because science now is kit and technology (machine) driven. Kits are black boxes to most (Add powder A, add powder B, add power C, etc.) so if the user doesn't even know what components are being used, how does one possibly troubleshoot experiments (and all experiments require extensive troubleshooting.)

The technology aspect is even worse- machines which nobody understands how they physically measure results that use software that few are properly trained on (each manufacturer has their own proprietary software, and have high training costs which most lab PI's cannot afford.

Science 1.0 is ugly.

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Chronicles of Retardia's avatar

Bring on Science 2.0! Just the other day I was having a chat with my neighbour about the ‘bird flu’ hysteria (rumblings about registering backyard chickens here, in rural Australia). She knows that it’s all a beat up to control the food supply but still thinks there’s a virus. I had to leave to feed my chickens haha, but I said to her, next time we chat I’ll tell you about how they claim to ‘isolate’ what they call viruses, which I now have down pat thanks to a loosely affiliated team of brilliant Science 2.0 teachers around the world. I’m forever grateful 🙏

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