Science must stay free from biases and funding influences to keep its core value of objectivity, argues John O’Sullivan, CEO of Principia-Scientific and co-author of Slaying the Virus and Vaccine Dragon.
Real science
The Scientific Method depends on observations, experiments and data analysis to get trustworthy results.
When research is influenced by funding sources and, thus, agendas, the objectivity of the findings is usually compromised.
Here’s the thing.
Research requires funding, but who will fund research that doesn’t support their interests? For example, Pepsi won’t fund research concluding that soft drinks are unhealthy.
Most research is junk
John Ioannidis, a physician and researcher at Stanford University, has done many studies that analyse the peer review process. In his 2005 paper titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, he shows that the majority of all peer-reviewed science is inaccurate, misleading or outright junk.
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
As biochemist David Rasnick has said multiple times, science died in the ’80s.
It’s become like a cult overrun with dogma.
There is a hierarchy with ‘experts’ at the top who hold authority and dispense knowledge to their followers from their peer-reviewed texts, treated as unquestionable truths.
Scientists, like cult leaders, have significant influence over how we see reality.
Trust the experts, bro.
Conversation
The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability—not the validity—of a new finding.
Richard Horton, former editor, The Lancet
