The Continuing Collapse of Scientific Authority -- The Gatekeepers Fail

The New York Times finally recognizes that there is a crisis of authority in medical science.

Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies in medical and scientific journals have called into question as never before the merits of their peer-review system.

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Virtually every major scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings that are later discredited....

[E]ven the system's most ardent supporters acknowledge that peer review does not eliminate mediocre and inferior papers and has never passed the very test for which it is used. Studies have found that journals publish findings based on sloppy statistics. If peer review were a drug, it would never be marketed, say critics, including journal editors.

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A widespread belief among nonscientists is that journal editors and their reviewers check authors' research firsthand and even repeat the research. In fact, journal editors do not routinely examine authors' scientific notebooks. Instead, they rely on peer reviewers' criticisms, which are based on the information submitted by the authors.
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Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry, say Dr. Richard Smith, the former editor of BMJ, the British medical journal, and Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, also based in Britain.

Read the whole thing here.

My criticisms of this article are three:

1) It's far too little and too late. This scandal has been public knowledge for years now and has been widely reported elsewhere. Once again the Times has dropped the ball, largely because it has been unwilling to admit that one of the main institutional pillars of the scientific establishment is not, and has never been, what it claimed to be -- a guarantor of objective information and judgment.

2) The Times lays the blame for corrupting the system exclusively on corporate interests, and does not recognize that activist groups with political agendas are far more likely to produce corrupt studies which are widely publicized by an ignorant and biased press establishment.

3) The Times does not admit that the problem of fraud and error is just as pervasive, perhaps even more so, in environmental studies as in medicine.

The crisis of scientific authority is, in short, far broader and deeper than the Times is willing to admit.