Problems with scientific research
科學(xué)研究存在的問題
How science goes wrong
科學(xué)怎么了？
Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself
一直在變革世界的科學(xué)研究已經(jīng)到了變革自身的時候了
Oct 19th 2013 |From the print edition of The Economist
譯者：老狒狒
“大膽假設(shè)，小心求證”，任何結(jié)果都應(yīng)當(dāng)接受實驗的驗證。這是支撐科學(xué)的一個理念。這個理念雖然簡單，但能量巨大，它為我們帶來了海量的知識。自17世紀(jì)誕生以來，當(dāng)代科學(xué)始終在改變著世界。在科學(xué)的手中，世界變了，變得連我們自己也認(rèn)不出來了，變得超乎想象的美好。
But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.
但是，科學(xué)在成功的同時，也滋生了自滿。當(dāng)代科學(xué)家“假設(shè)”有余，“求證”不足。這對整個科學(xué)和全體人類來說，都是有害的。
Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “l(fā)andmark” 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 frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
充斥學(xué)術(shù)殿堂的太多新論文或是低劣實驗的結(jié)果，或是站不住腳的分析的結(jié)論。存在于生物技術(shù)風(fēng)投資本家中的一個經(jīng)驗法則認(rèn)為，在已經(jīng)發(fā)表的研究中，有半數(shù)是不可復(fù)制的。但實際情況可能并沒有這么樂觀。生物技術(shù)公司Amgen的科研人員在去年曾發(fā)現(xiàn)，在癌癥研究領(lǐng)域的53項“里程碑式”的研究中，只有6項可以是復(fù)制的。再早些時候，拜耳制藥公司的一個研究團隊也做過一個類似的統(tǒng)計，結(jié)果發(fā)現(xiàn)：在67篇具有相似重要性的論文中，只有四分之一可以勉強通過復(fù)制。一位計算機行業(yè)的頂尖科學(xué)家抱怨道，在他的專業(yè)領(lǐng)域內(nèi)，四分之三的論文屬于那種沒有實質(zhì)內(nèi)容空話。在2000年-2010年間，有大約80000名患者參與了基于因錯誤或不當(dāng)行為而后來被撤回的研究的臨床試驗
What a load of rubbish
垃圾何其多
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 squanders money and the efforts of some of the world's best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
即便大多數(shù)有缺陷的研究工作還遠沒有達到轉(zhuǎn)化為實際應(yīng)用，以致危及人的生命這種程度，但這種研究整體來說是一種浪費，即浪費了資金，又浪費了世界上最優(yōu)秀人才為之而付出的努力?？蒲羞M程停滯不前的機會成本難以用具體的數(shù)字來衡量，并且可能還會不斷上升。
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 pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish” 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 vie for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people's results) does little to advance a researcher's career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
原因之一在于學(xué)術(shù)界的競爭越來越激烈。在二戰(zhàn)中成名后，當(dāng)代學(xué)術(shù)研究在進入上世紀(jì)50年代時開始逐漸成形。不過，那時的科學(xué)研究仍然是一種只有少數(shù)人才能參加的休閑活動。整個俱樂部不過幾十萬會員而已。此后，這只隊伍不斷膨脹。據(jù)最新估算，當(dāng)今活躍的科研人員總數(shù)在600萬人-700萬人之間。隨著會員的急劇增加，該俱樂部逐漸失去了自律的興趣，不再關(guān)心如何提高自己的質(zhì)量?！安话l(fā)表論文，就等于自我毀滅”的論調(diào)主導(dǎo)了研究人員的學(xué)術(shù)生涯。為學(xué)術(shù)職位而進行的競爭殘酷而激烈。在美國，全職教授平均收入已經(jīng)在2012年超過法官，達到135000美元。任何一個學(xué)術(shù)職位每年都有6名剛剛獲得博士學(xué)位的人參與競爭。如今，驗證別人研究成果的“求證”工作，幾乎不會給你的學(xué)術(shù)職位晉升有任何幫助。但是，如果沒有“求證”，可疑的研究成果會一直存在下去，并最終發(fā)展為誤導(dǎo)人們的謬誤。
Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking 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 pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut feeling”. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise. Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
名利思想也在鼓勵夸大結(jié)論和有選擇地挑選結(jié)論的行為。為了確保獨家性，著名的學(xué)術(shù)期刊都設(shè)置了高比例的退稿率，也就是說在提交的論文中，有超過90%的文章是不會被發(fā)表。結(jié)論越具轟動性，被刊發(fā)的機會就越大。一個不爭的事實是：在每三位研究者中就有一位知道，他的同行一直都在做著將不利數(shù)據(jù)從“基于直覺”的結(jié)果中排除出去的事情。同時，隨著世界上對同一個問題的研究團隊越來越多，在真實發(fā)現(xiàn)的甜蜜信號與統(tǒng)計噪聲的刺耳聲音之間，至少會有一個團隊會深受“誠實困惑”之害的概率越來越小。此類虛假的相關(guān)性常被急于刊載轟動性論文的期刊所刊載。 設(shè)若這些文章涉及的是飲酒、衰老、甚或允許孩童打電玩之類的題目， 也是非常有可能被登載在報紙的頭版上面。
Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis 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.
相反，證明某一假設(shè)是錯誤的論文卻很少被提交給學(xué)術(shù)期刊出版，更別提被學(xué)術(shù)期刊所采納了。在1990年時，以“負(fù)面結(jié)果”為主的論文還占已發(fā)表論文的30%，而如今這個比例已經(jīng)下降到14%。然而，在科學(xué)的眼里，“知道什么是錯誤的”和“知道什么是正確的”，兩者同樣重要。不能找出錯誤意味著研究者在浪費精力，他們把金錢和努力投入到早已被別的科學(xué)家證明是錯誤的盲目探索上。
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up 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.
同時，同行評審機制也不像它自己所吹捧的那樣神圣。當(dāng)某著名醫(yī)學(xué)期刊把超出某些專家研究領(lǐng)域的論文交給他們審閱時，竟然發(fā)現(xiàn)這樣一個怪事：大多數(shù)評審者甚至在已經(jīng)被告知自己正在接受檢驗的情況下，仍然不能發(fā)現(xiàn)該期刊有意塞進論文中的一些錯誤。
If it's broke, fix it
亡羊就補牢
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 sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones.
科學(xué)的使命是發(fā)現(xiàn)真理，這是她的根基之所在，而上述種種情況卻已經(jīng)讓這個根基開始晃動。那么，科學(xué)應(yīng)當(dāng)怎樣才能讓這個根基變得牢固起來呢？首先，應(yīng)當(dāng)找出在收緊標(biāo)準(zhǔn)方面做得最好的學(xué)科，把它樹立成一個榜樣。然后再讓所有的學(xué)科都想這個榜樣學(xué)習(xí)。這可以從認(rèn)真對待統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù)做起。隨著為尋找模型而必須篩選海量數(shù)據(jù)的領(lǐng)域日漸增多，它們尤其應(yīng)該成為這方面的重點關(guān)注對象。遺傳學(xué)家一直在做這項工作，來自基因組測序的前期數(shù)據(jù)既多且雜，經(jīng)過篩選，他們已經(jīng)將它們轉(zhuǎn)化為一小部分有真正意義的數(shù)據(jù)。
Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with 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, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
在理想的情況下，應(yīng)當(dāng)提前將研究協(xié)議登記在案，并以實際行動對其進行監(jiān)督。這樣，經(jīng)常在實驗設(shè)計流程中的弄虛作假的沖動就會得到抑制，從而讓結(jié)果看上去比現(xiàn)在更值得信任。（這種做法早就應(yīng)該被藥物臨床實驗所采納?？上У牡氖?，響應(yīng)者寥寥無幾。）實驗數(shù)據(jù)也應(yīng)當(dāng)在可以公開的場合，對其他研究者公開，供他們對其進行檢驗。
The most enlightened journals are already becoming less averse to humdrum papers. Some government funding agencies, including America's National Institutes of Health, which dish 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.
開明的期刊正在轉(zhuǎn)變態(tài)度，他們現(xiàn)在已經(jīng)不像以前那樣討厭單調(diào)的論文了。某些由政府資助的科研機構(gòu)，如每年可獲得300億美元科研經(jīng)費的美國國家衛(wèi)生研究所，正在制定方案，以求最大限度地鼓勵“求證”行為。同時，越來越多的科學(xué)家，尤其是年輕科學(xué)家已經(jīng)學(xué)會了統(tǒng)計的方法。但是，這些趨勢進一步發(fā)展。學(xué)術(shù)期刊應(yīng)當(dāng)為“別人不感興趣”的課題留出空間，投資者應(yīng)當(dāng)先把盈利放在一邊，而為其投入資金。學(xué)術(shù)期刊還應(yīng)當(dāng)提高同行評審的質(zhì)量，或者是干脆放棄這種做法，代之以用追加評論的形式，對已經(jīng)發(fā)表的論文進行評估。近年來，數(shù)學(xué)和物理學(xué)這兩個學(xué)科一直在采用這套體系，并且還取得了不錯的效果。最后，政策制定者應(yīng)當(dāng)確保使用公眾資金的機構(gòu)也尊重這套規(guī)則。
Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—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 shoddy research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.
科學(xué)也有犯迷糊的時候，但她仍然擁有巨大的號召力。但科學(xué)之所以享有受人尊敬的地位，是因為科學(xué)能夠在大多數(shù)時間內(nèi)確保是自己是正確的。即便出現(xiàn)問題，她也能改正自己的錯誤。宇宙中不缺少能讓數(shù)代科學(xué)家為之而努力工作的秘密。低劣的科學(xué)研究會留下錯誤痕跡，這些痕跡對認(rèn)識能力來說，是一個無法原諒的障礙。
From the print edition: Leaders
