首页
登录
职称英语
How science goes wrong Scientific research has c
How science goes wrong Scientific research has c
游客
2023-07-02
57
管理
问题
How science goes wrong
Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself.
A)A simple idea underlies science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed extreme self-satisfaction. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying, damaging the whole of science, and of humanity. B)Too many of the findings are the result of cheap experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated(复制). Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 "milestone" studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist worries that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are nonsense. In 2000-10, roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later withdrawn because of mistakes or improperness.
What a load of rubbish
C)Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it blows money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of hindered progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
D)One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the Second World War, it was still a rarefied(小众的)pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled to 6m -7m active researchers on the latest account, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to "publish or perish(消亡)" has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs strive for every academic post. Nowadays verification(the replication of other people’s results)does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, uncertain findings live on to mislead.
E)Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the choose-the-most-profitable of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has polished a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results based on his instinct, And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, it is more likely that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a nut of the statistical noise. Such lake correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
F)Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis(假设)are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. "Negative results" now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
G)The holy process of peer review is not all it is praised to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
If it’s broke, fix it
H)All this makes a shaky foundation for an enterprise dedicated to discovering the truth about the world. What might be done to shore it up? One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that screen through untold crowds of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early stream of deceptive results from genome sequencing(基因组测序)into a flow of truly significant ones.
I)Ideally, research protocols(草案)should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to manipulate the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are.(It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs.)
Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
J)The most enlightened journals are already showing less dislike of tedious papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which give out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends need to go much further. Journals should allocate space for "uninteresting" work, and grant-givers should set- aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
K)Science still commands enormous—if sometimes perplexed—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by cheap research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding. [br] Some clinical trials from 2000 to 2010 were later abandoned by reason of mistakes or impropemess.
选项
答案
B
解析
本题涉及目前学术问题的危害,由clinical trials from 2000 to 2010和mistakes or improper-ness可以定位到B段最后一句。原文提到2000年到2010年间一些临床试验因为试验所依据的研究存在错误或者不当之处而被撤销,题中by reason of对应原文because of,本题是对B段最后一句的同义转述,故选B。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/2801871.html
相关试题推荐
Workerswithskillsinscience,technology,engineering,andmathematics(STE
Workerswithskillsinscience,technology,engineering,andmathematics(STE
Workerswithskillsinscience,technology,engineering,andmathematics(STE
[originaltext]W:Haveyoufinishedreadingmyresearchreport?Iputitonyour
[originaltext]W:Haveyoufinishedreadingmyresearchreport?Iputitonyour
[originaltext]W:Haveyoufinishedreadingmyresearchreport?Iputitonyour
[originaltext]W:Haveyoufinishedreadingmyresearchreport?Iputitonyour
[originaltext]W:Haveyoufinishedreadingmyresearchreport?Iputitonyour
TheUnitedStates’predominanceinscienceandtechnologyisfading,arepor
TheUnitedStates’predominanceinscienceandtechnologyisfading,arepor
随机试题
圆心在原点、半径为5的圆上有多少个整数点?A、16B、10C、20D、14E、12E圆的方程可以表示为x2+y2=25,圆上的整数点可以分为两类:位于
材料一:某省是我国主要的手机生产地之一,并且生产有多个品牌的手机。下图是该省2
配置管理工作中,确定配置项的所有者及其责任、确定配置项进入配置管理的时间和条件是
A.国家食品药品监督管理局药品注册司 B.国家药典委员会 C.国家食品药品监
患者男,80岁。原发性高血压10年。长期服用排钾利尿剂控制血压,现因低血钾收入院
社会公德、职业道德和家庭美德的状况,最终都是以每个社会成员的道德品质为基础的,因
商业银行为客户进行风险评估时,评估结果认为某一客户不适宜购买某一产品,但客户仍坚
现浇(预应力)钢筋混凝土水池的施工方案应包括结构形式、材料与配比、施工工艺及流程
胰泌素引起的胰腺分泌胰液的特点是( )。A.水和HCO3-多,酶少 B.水和
下列施工进度控制工作中,属于施工进度计划检查的内容是( )。A.增加施工班组人
最新回复
(
0
)