Science and Society

“Human beings in a mob / What’s a mob to a king? / What’s a king to a god? / What’s a god to a non-believer who don’t believe in anything?”

The haunting Frank Ocean hook in “No Church in the Wild” from Watch the Throne played through my head as I read Jennifer Couzin-Frankel’s article, “When Mice Mislead” in the Nov. 22 News Focus section of the Science magazine website.

Couzin-Frankel writes about recent waves made in the animal research community by those questioning current drug-trial models in animals. One of those wave-makers is Ulrich Dirnagl, a German researcher who is calling attention to the negative aspects of the practice of cutting animals out of a results set without justification.

Couzin-Frankel writes, “Dropping animals from a research study for any number of reasons…is an entrenched, accepted part of the culture [in animal research]. ‘You look at your data, there are no rules. … People exclude animals at their whim, they just do it and they don’t report it,’ [said Dirnagl]. That bad habit, he believes, is one of several that plague animal studies.”

Animal studies have been used to explore potential drug therapies for decades. And during all those years, “researchers, pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators, and even the general public have lamented how rarely therapies that cure animals do much of anything for humans.”

Why is that the case? Is human biology so dramatically different from animal biology as to make animal models irrelevant? Many have asked that question, and “much attention has focused on whether mice with different diseases accurately reflect what happens in sick people. But Dirnagl and some others suggest there’s another equally acute problem,” according to Couzin-Frankel, and one that has less to do with different biology and more to do with how the studies are conducted.

Malcolm Macleod from the University of Edinburgh analyzed variations in experimental technique in animal drug trials and found a general lack of randomization and blinding, both of which increase experimental objectivity, that has resulted in skewed data.

In the studies analyzed, “many of these authors likely didn’t recognize what Macleod perceived as lack of rigor in their studies because their mentors, and their mentors’ mentors, had not [conducted randomized, blinded trials],” he writes.

There’s a sort of institutional inertia in the animal research community – passed down from mentor to mentee – that has resulted in a pervasive lack of built-in checks to ensure objectivity.

How did the scientific community allow such a lapse in objectivity to occur?

I would like to propose an answer, for what it’s worth. Reading Couzin-Frankel’s accounts of mice dropped out of data sets at greatest convenience, it struck me that the real issue at play is a lack of curiosity.

The scientists leaving data out of studies have lost sight of the purpose of scientific investigation: to gain some knowledge and insight into the workings of the world. Instead of investigating why the data – the whole data set, not just a piece – appears the way it did, these scientists are choosing to shape the results to match their bias, a bias influenced by ego, funding sources, institutional inertia – a whole host of factors.

Bias is a problem in the scientific endeavor because it is the first step toward doctrine. Biased reporting of results contradicts the fundamental tenet of science: that any and all theories are open to be modified or turned on their head if enough significant evidence presents itself.

Science is not a biased doctrine. It is a mindset, a humble attempt to understand the unknown, the other, the wildness of this world in which we live. The scientist must be a “non-believer, who [doesn’t] believe in anything,” Couzin-Frankel said, in order to  construct her understanding of the world from objective observation and from her understanding, construct a meaningful narrative.