No.

To quote myself and colleagues in JAMA Internal Medicine:

Among the drugs approved on the basis of response rate, there was only a weak correlation between cost and the magnitude of the response rate gain; the same was true in the categories of drugs approved on the basis of PFS and OS gains. This suggests that cancer drugs are priced based predominantly on what the market will bear. Correcting this trend is vital for the solvency of health care and pharmaceutical development.

The following caveats apply:

• We looked at median wholesale price, not the retail price. Wholesale cost is what the drug companies think their products are worth. Retail price is what the markets think they are worth. But there are such things as anchoring and, as the accompanying editorial nicely reviewed, the biggest players on that market Medicare and Medicaid are forbidden by law to bargain.
• We only reported overall survival (OS), progression free survival (PFS) and overall response rate (ORR). We looked at other things as well, like mechanism of action and how novel the drug is, which will be reported separately.
• We only looked at the last 6 years of approvals.
• We only looked at cancer drugs.

But if you are a medical student or a resident and want to do some important work while buffing up your CV, feel free to copy our methods and apply them to other areas of medicine! Something like this for cardiology or endocrinology would do a whole lot more good than yet another case report of something presenting as something else.

Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair:

Though Fenton is a FEMA superstar with ample experience responding to tornadoes and hurricanes, it would have been more logical for the top person to come from within the HHS family of agencies, though a division director from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was assigned as Fenton’s deputy. The choice “reflects the fact that CDC can’t operate its way out of a paper bag,” said the former HHS official.

Third year into the covid-19 pandemic and I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that the CDC is moribund. Institutional decay comes for all during the fat and lazy times.

Katherine Eban also wrote this brilliant account of the lab-leak hypothesis and a hair-raising book about the FDA that made the agency’s fumbles, unlike the CDC’s, not at all surprising.

Donald McNeil, formerly of the New York Times, wrote a primer on the monkeypox outbreak which is well worth the 10 minutes' reading time. The bottom line: not great, not terrible. For now.

“This was an ambitious report recommending all sorts of ways to reform government, but no one was given a mandate and timeline to actually carry out the recommendations.”

Thus ends every attempt to reform administrative burden of research, according to the Good Science Project.

“The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology was an 8-year effort to replicate experiments from high-impact cancer biology papers published between 2010 and 2012.”

Out of 193 experiments from 53 papers, only 50 (26%) were successfully reproduced, and in those the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average. Scientists at Bayer did the same thing 10 years ago, with identical results: only 20-25% of experiments reproduced.

With foundations like this, it is amazing that there has been any progress in the clinic.

Several imprecisions in this essay on IRBs should not detract from its key point: social sciences don’t need IRB oversight, biomedicine needs it to be less byzantine and more transparent. Status quo is untenable.

Give a lecture once and you help a few hundred people (if you’re lucky). Post the lecture to YouTube and you help millions. 7 years later, I am yet to find a better guide to academic writing.

NB: it’s good to have a live audience.

“Whether hot or cold water freezes faster remains unknown.”

Thus begins a wonderful Quanta Magazine article about the “Mpemba effect”, named after a Tanzanian teenager who saw something funny happen to his home-made ice cream. Reality is complicated.

“A lot of people simply won’t read a 15-page whitepaper, but will be impressed by flowcharts. By making the language of Web3 meandering and impenetrable and by building a culture that is very self-referential, investors make criticism harder to come by.”

Today’s Galaxy Brain newsletter is about Web3, but replace “whitepaper” with “manuscript” and “investors” with “researchers” and you get bad science in a nutshell.

“If you are trying to figure out a thinker and his or her defects, see if you can spot that person’s “once-and-for-all” moves. There will be plenty of them.”

Cowen is right, though we can debate whether early closure is a defect or a feature.