"In preparing this remarkable book, Ernest Hook persuaded an eminent group of scientists, historians, sociologists and philosophers to focus on the problem: why are some discoveries rejected at a particular time but later seen to be valid? The interaction of these experts did not produce agreement on 'prematurity' in science but something more valuable: a collection of fascinating papers, many of them based on new research and analysis, which sometimes forced the author to revise a previously-held opinion. The book should (...) be enthusiastically welcomed by all readers who are interested in how science works."—Stephen G. Brush, co-author of Physics, The Human Adventure: From copernicus to Einstein and Beyond "Prematurity and Scientific Discovery contains interesting and insightful papers by numerous well-known scientists and scholars. It will be of wide interest, not only to science studies scholars but also to working scientists and to science-literate general readers."—Thomas Nickles, editor of Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality. (shrink)

In September 2000, the self-styled “anthropological journalist” Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney’s claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney’s claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA’s problematic actions (...) in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney’s falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles. (shrink)

Chronic ailments — arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular problems, kidney and liver and other organ failures — arise in different ways and for different reasons than do infectious diseases. Drugs have been very successful in overcoming infectious diseases, but their application to chronic ailments is illogical and harmful. Is a treatment against cardiovascular disease (for example) beneficial? Does it prolong life and improve quality of life? Valid answers would be based on very large and lengthy clinical trials controlling for innumerable variables — (...) essentially impossible. Therefore research and applications make use of surrogate markers, measurables like blood pressure, cholesterol level, etc. But in order to determine whether a surrogate marker is an accurate measure of the state of a chronic ailment would require one of those impossible clinical trials. The use of surrogate markers is based more on faith than evidence. Worse, it assumes that correlations identify causations. The commonly used surrogate markers are not valid. Nevertheless, drugs continue to be approved because of their effect on these markers. Further, the accelerated approval of drugs initiated in the 1990s requires only two successful trials of at least 6 months duration. That is not nearly long enough to test safety or efficacy, and the last two decades have seen an increasing number of once-approved drugs withdrawn after less and less time on the market because of their deadly so-called “side” effects. “Side” is a fatally misleading misnomer. The misguided drug-based treatment of chronic ailments is facilitated by semantic sleight-of-word, calling natural conditions diseases, dysfunctions, abnormal: cardiovascular disease; hypertension; “high” and “bad” cholesterol; “pre”-diabetes, “pre”-hypertension, etc. Outstandingly illogical is the approach to blood pressure. For more than century it’s been known that blood pressure normally rises with age. But nowadays “hypertension” is defined by the same number irrespective of age, so that the average person normally attains “hypertension” at about age 60 ; some 75% of American seniors are treated with drugs to lower what is the normal pressure for their age. Blood pressure increases with age. Mortality increases with age. The incidence of cancers and of organ failures increases with age. Everything that increases with age is correlated with everything else that increases with age. Therefore blood pressure is correlated with every chronic ailment, but it doesn’t necessarily cause any of them. (shrink)

This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II. Science-Mart attributes this decline to a powerful neoliberal ideology in the 1980s which saw the fruits of scientific investigation as commodities that could be monetized, rather than as a public good.