Scientists Are Not So Hot At Predicting Which Cancer Studies Will Succeed
"Science relies on the careful collection and analysis of facts. Science also benefits
from human judgment, but that intuition isn't necessarily reliable. A study finds that scientists did a poor job forecasting whether a successful experiment would work on a second try."
"That matters, because scientists can waste a lot of time if they read the results from another lab and eagerly chase after bum leads."
"'There are lots of different candidates for drugs you might develop or different for research programs you might want to invest in,' says Jonathan Kimmelman, an associate professor of biomedical ethics at McGill University in Montreal. 'What you want is a way to discriminate between those investments that are going to pay off down the road, and those that are just going to fizzle.'"