Science For The People, By The People

If, like me, you've had it up to here with scientists and their starchy white lab coats and their insufferable know-it-all attitudes, you might be interested in a new scientific study which maintains that a majority of all scientific studies are hogwash. (Which may or may not mean that the study itself is all wet. You pays your grant money and you takes your chances.) From the invaluable New Scientist, the Web's number one site for pseudo-news about demi-science:

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false.

Putting aside the delightful sound of the guy's name (it's like a Michigan State researcher being called George Michiganstatesky), this really is excellent news. It allows lay readers what they've always needed: official sanction to ignore most of the inevitably conflicting research that gets put before them. Confused by a Tuesday study that maintains coffee extends life and a Thursday study that says caffeine is poison?  Flummoxed by two papers issued the same day on opposite sides of the world, one holding that obesity is a death sentence, the other claiming that humans may weigh up to six hundred pounds without sustaining any ill effects? Just pick the one you like! This plucks the review process out of the closeted ranks of researchers' so-called "peers" and places it squarely where it belongs -- with the average citizens who are science's ultimate victims or beneficiaries.  Why, it's downright democratic! And who knows: Freed from the strictures of peer review, science might even shift its attention to something useful, Like, say, turning dark meat into white meat. You gotta live the dream.