The Lancet: UK life science research: time to burst the biomedical bubble

Editorial: UK life science research: time to burst the biomedical bubble

The precariousness of life science research in the UK can also be traced back to a lacklustre approach to research integrity. Research misconduct, questionable research practices, and a reliance on publication numbers as a metric of academic success all lead to research waste, which drives down productivity of the sector and threatens its financial sustainability.
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A radical shift of life sciences funding priorities, away from the biomedical bubble and towards the social, behavioural, and environmental determinants of health, is now needed.

 

And my irony-meter explodes again...

 

Maybe it's just me, not being a scientist and all, but how does this address the stated problem, in any way?

 

'Research misconduct is a problem in science, therefore we have to change the topic we are studying' is probably the cleanest epitomization of a non-sequitur I have seen recently.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1020310078275170304

 

@dave30th Have you seen this thread?

 

It's not just you @Wonko.

Reading this is a bit like treading on a slug with bare feet by mistake.

 

The vagueness of the plan suggests that the concrete reality of it will be upsetting.

 

Indeed. Two completely unrelated statements connected, by some perverse reasoning, with "therefore". Weird.

 

Yes because all that money that has been wasted on biomedical studies for things like ME now needs to go towards the BPS model.

 

Isn't the research in...

"social, behavioural, and environmental determinants of health"

...already well known to be...

"a lacklustre approach to research integrity. Research misconduct, questionable research practices,
and a reliance on publication numbers as a metric of academic success"

 

Interesting to see that NESTA received is said to have received an initial endowment of £250million from the National Lottery. Never knew that was the aim of the National Lottery.

 

The report itself is authored by a Professor of Physics and a Professor of Social Sciences Research.

 

For anyone who didn't know (like me), if you want to see the Twitter activity on this Lancet editorial, click on "PlumX Metrics" and you can see the tweets and retweets mentioning it.

Edit : And there are quite a few who love it.

 

Ah! Just found the authors :

https://twitter.com/RichardALJones

https://twitter.com/jameswilsdon

 

I knew that phrase rang a bell. It popped up earlier today in the article linked from this thread.

The article, from National Public Radio in the US, looks at the growing industry focussed on mining data about all of us and, in the US at least, using it to adjust (ie raise) insurance premiums.

The article begins:

This is clearly one of those new horizons in 'healthcare' which can be made to sound useful but ends up being largely a tool for making money. You can certainly see its appeal for biopsychosocial psychs and their best friends in the insurance industry, especially if they can get the UK government to fork out for the research that creates the tools that create the profits (a sort of BPS Golden Triangle)

 

The report itself is here: https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/biomedical-bubble/

The Lancet are not the only ones to report on it. The Guardian and FT have also done "editorials" too.

 

It may not address the stated problem but it certainly addresses the problem they are actually trying to manage: reducing costs. There seems to be this weird idea floating around in the past few years that biomedical science has found everything it would ever find and the rest is just dotting i's and crossing t's, with a few recalcitrant patients in the mix too stubborn to accept that they're actually healthy. Nevermind that biomedical research is producing more results than it ever did.

This ridiculous assertion of a "biomedical bubble" is impossible to explain otherwise. It's taking the most successful idea in the history of medicine and downplaying its importance. Really weird reversal back into woo science and behavioral ideology. Seems like a return to "disease personalities" is right around the corner.