Question: why should we take your declarations of who is and isn't a scientist more seriously than the scientists themselves?
Lets take a typical cancer drug. It goes through safty, dosing, and efficiacy clinical trials. In lucky cases, it will show efficacy in a multi-year clinical trial across many geographic locations with hundreds of patients.
If the trial is successful, the FDA will eventually approve the drug, the drug can now be prescribed. The FDA mandates that follow up study is done continuously to learn more about the drug; better indications for use, contraindications for when it won't work, etc.
Where does "replication" come into any of this? Why in the world would somebody replicate a dosing study and generate the same data? That would be unethical, dangerous, and counterproductive. At best, one would throw out bad data that was improperly collected. At worst, one would just abandon the drug and move on to a different candidate drug.
When it comes to human studies that come at real cost to human life, not using all the best available information is unscientific, unethical, should result in civil penalties, and should probably result in criminal penalties as well.
This is the situation that the parent was asking about; by making short blanket statements about what a scientist is and is not, without considering the real issues at hand, makes it seem like you're not engaging the issue.
"Scientists replicate data" is a simple thing to say if you're looking at stars or running a particle collider or working on a new synthetic compound; taking that simple minded attitude is not appropriate for much of the most expensive research out there.
The question of what to replicate and when is a difficult one; it's the tradeoff between new discovery and making sure you're on the right path. If you can make a new discovery that simultaneously proves or disproves that you're on the right path, that's a smarter move, but it's not "replication."
THANK YOU. Nobody seems to pick up on the fact that those 3-5 trials cost (on average) in the hundreds of millions of dollars ($30-50M).
Not to mention the countless Institutional, Human Subject, and ethics review boards that must be satisfied before we can even begin to think about laying hands on a human to conduct a study of any sort - let alone one with an investigational new drug.
Lets take a typical cancer drug. It goes through safty, dosing, and efficiacy clinical trials. In lucky cases, it will show efficacy in a multi-year clinical trial across many geographic locations with hundreds of patients.
If the trial is successful, the FDA will eventually approve the drug, the drug can now be prescribed. The FDA mandates that follow up study is done continuously to learn more about the drug; better indications for use, contraindications for when it won't work, etc.
Where does "replication" come into any of this? Why in the world would somebody replicate a dosing study and generate the same data? That would be unethical, dangerous, and counterproductive. At best, one would throw out bad data that was improperly collected. At worst, one would just abandon the drug and move on to a different candidate drug.
When it comes to human studies that come at real cost to human life, not using all the best available information is unscientific, unethical, should result in civil penalties, and should probably result in criminal penalties as well.
This is the situation that the parent was asking about; by making short blanket statements about what a scientist is and is not, without considering the real issues at hand, makes it seem like you're not engaging the issue.
"Scientists replicate data" is a simple thing to say if you're looking at stars or running a particle collider or working on a new synthetic compound; taking that simple minded attitude is not appropriate for much of the most expensive research out there.
The question of what to replicate and when is a difficult one; it's the tradeoff between new discovery and making sure you're on the right path. If you can make a new discovery that simultaneously proves or disproves that you're on the right path, that's a smarter move, but it's not "replication."