I briefly dated someone with a PHD in cancer biology who worked on the marketing side for pharmaceuticals through a "consulting" company.<p>On multiple occasions I watched her manipulate datasets to produce visualizations favoring whatever drug was being pushed at that time.<p>The rationalization process was something like the treatments were basically all equally ineffective against the specific type/stage of cancer, but still the best choices at the time for people who were going to live for a brief period no matter what. So they tweak the graphs to slightly favor whoever is paying for the research, something on the order of a couple more months of life expectancy vs. the alternatives. Just enough to funnel the patients.<p><i>sigh</i>
Interesting. When the original report was submitted to HN last week, the top comment was from someone working in the field basically saying it was a nothingburger. [1] This latest development doesn't necessarily contradict that, but it does show that executives at least saw the issue as rather serious.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944235" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944235</a>
List of publications by Baselga: <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4840569-Baselga-Article-List.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4840569-Baselga-Arti...</a>
The more you learn about these stories, the more you realize that our world is just a giant clusterfuck. We haven't witnessed many revolutionary medical breakthroughs in recent years or even decades. With little resources back then scientists were still able to invent breakthroughs such as vaccines, anesthesia, antibiotics, etc. Consider all the money being dumped into medical research field today, it's disheartening that we haven't been able to achieve anything near the same level. The returns are quickly diminishing.<p>The medical field seems to progress at much slower pace compared to other fields like computer science. Are we facing talents distribution problem? The world certainly didn't have companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook back then. Are these tech companies sucking up most talents? It's sad to imagine our brightest people are being utilized to create more online ads rather than help curing the world.