【科学怎么了？】
Problems with scientific research 科学研究存在的问题 How science goes wrong 科学怎么了？ Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself 一直在变革世界的科学研究已经到了变革自身的时候了 Oct 19th 2013 |From the print edition of The Economist 译者：老狒狒 “大胆假设，小心求证”，任何结果都应当接受实验的验证。这是支撑科学的一个理念。这个理念虽然简单，但能量巨大，它为我们带来了海量的知识。自17世纪诞生以来，当代科学始终在改变着世界。在科学的手中，世界变了，变得连我们自己也认不出来了，变得超乎想象的美好。 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，科学在成功的同时，也滋生了自满。当代科学家“假设”有余，“求证”不足。这对整个科学和全体人类来说，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 “landmark” 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. 充斥学术殿堂的太多新论文或是低劣实验的结果，或是站不住脚的分析的结论。存在于生物技术风投资本家中的一个经验法则认为，在已经发表的研究中，有半数是不可复制的。但实际情况可能并没有这么乐观。生物技术公司Amgen的科研人员在去年曾发现，在癌症研究领域的53项“里程碑式”的研究中，只有6项可以是复制的。再早些时候，拜耳制药公司的一个研究团队也做过一个类似的统计，结果发现：在67篇具有相似重要性的论文中，只有四分之一可以勉强通过复制。一位计算机行业的顶尖科学家抱怨道，在他的专业领域内，四分之三的论文属于那种没有实质内容空话。在2000年-2010年间，有大约80000名患者参与了基于因错误或不当行为而后来被撤回的研究的临床试验 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. 即便大多数有缺陷的研究工作还远没有达到转化为实际应用，以致危及人的生命这种程度，但这种研究整体来说是一种浪费，即浪费了资金，又浪费了世界上最优秀人才为之而付出的努力。科研进程停滞不前的机会成本难以用具体的数字来衡量，并且可能还会不断上升。 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. 原因之一在于学术界的竞争越来越激烈。在二战中成名后，当代学术研究在进入上世纪50年代时开始逐渐成形。不过，那时的科学研究仍然是一种只有少数人才能参加的休闲活动。整个俱乐部不过几十万会员而已。此后，这只队伍不断膨胀。据最新估算，当今活跃的科研人员总数在600万人-700万人之间。随着会员的急剧增加，该俱乐部逐渐失去了自律的兴趣，不再关心如何提高自己的质量。“不发表论文，就等于自我毁灭”的论调主导了研究人员的学术生涯。为学术职位而进行的竞争残酷而激烈。在美国，全职教授平均收入已经在2012年超过法官，达到135000美元。任何一个学术职位每年都有6名刚刚获得博士学位的人参与竞争。如今，验证别人研究成果的“求证”工作，几乎不会给你的学术职位晋升有任何帮助。但是，如果没有“求证”，可疑的研究成果会一直存在下去，并最终发展为误导人们的谬误。 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. 名利思想也在鼓励夸大结论和有选择地挑选结论的行为。为了确保独家性，著名的学术期刊都设置了高比例的退稿率，也就是说在提交的论文中，有超过90%的文章是不会被发表。结论越具轰动性，被刊发的机会就越大。一个不争的事实是：在每三位研究者中就有一位知道，他的同行一直都在做着将不利数据从“基于直觉”的结果中排除出去的事情。同时，随着世界上对同一个问题的研究团队越来越多，在真实发现的甜蜜信号与统计噪声的刺耳声音之间，至少会有一个团队会深受“诚实困惑”之害的概率越来越小。此类虚假的相关性常被急于刊载轰动性论文的期刊所刊载。 设若这些文章涉及的是饮酒、衰老、甚或允许孩童打电玩之类的题目， 也是非常有可能被登载在报纸的头版上面。 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，证明某一假设是错误的论文却很少被提交给学术期刊出版，更别提被学术期刊所采纳了。在1990年时，以“负面结果”为主的论文还占已发表论文的30%，而如今这个比例已经下降到14%。然而，在科学的眼里，“知道什么是错误的”和“知道什么是正确的”，两者同样重要。不能找出错误意味着研究者在浪费精力，他们把金钱和努力投入到早已被别的科学家证明是错误的盲目探索上。 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. 同时，同行评审机制也不像它自己所吹捧的那样神圣。当某著名医学期刊把超出某些专家研究领域的论文交给他们审阅时，竟然发现这样一个怪事：大多数评审者甚至在已经被告知自己正在接受检验的情况下，仍然不能发现该期刊有意塞进论文中的一些错误。 If it's broke, fix it 亡羊就补牢 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. 科学的使命是发现真理，这是她的根基之所在，而上述种种情况却已经让这个根基开始晃动。那么，科学应当怎样才能让这个根基变得牢固起来呢？首先，应当找出在收紧标准方面做得最好的学科，把它树立成一个榜样。然后再让所有的学科都想这个榜样学习。这可以从认真对待统计数据做起。随着为寻找模型而必须筛选海量数据的领域日渐增多，它们尤其应该成为这方面的重点关注对象。遗传学家一直在做这项工作，来自基因组测序的前期数据既多且杂，经过筛选，他们已经将它们转化为一小部分有真正意义的数据。 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. 在理想的情况下，应当提前将研究协议登记在案，并以实际行动对其进行监督。这样，经常在实验设计流程中的弄虚作假的冲动就会得到抑制，从而让结果看上去比现在更值得信任。（这种做法早就应该被药物临床实验所采纳。可惜的的是，响应者寥寥无几。）实验数据也应当在可以公开的场合，对其他研究者公开，供他们对其进行检验。 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. 开明的期刊正在转变态度，他们现在已经不像以前那样讨厌单调的论文了。某些由政府资助的科研机构，如每年可获得300亿美元科研经费的美国国家卫生研究所，正在制定方案，以求最大限度地鼓励“求证”行为。同时，越来越多的科学家，尤其是年轻科学家已经学会了统计的方法。但是，这些趋势进一步发展。学术期刊应当为“别人不感兴趣”的课题留出空间，投资者应当先把盈利放在一边，而为其投入资金。学术期刊还应当提高同行评审的质量，或者是干脆放弃这种做法，代之以用追加评论的形式，对已经发表的论文进行评估。近年来，数学和物理学这两个学科一直在采用这套体系，并且还取得了不错的效果。最后，政策制定者应当确保使用公众资金的机构也尊重这套规则。 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. 科学也有犯迷糊的时候，但她仍然拥有巨大的号召力。但科学之所以享有受人尊敬的地位，是因为科学能够在大多数时间内确保是自己是正确的。即便出现问题，她也能改正自己的错误。宇宙中不缺少能让数代科学家为之而努力工作的秘密。低劣的科学研究会留下错误痕迹，这些痕迹对认识能力来说，是一个无法原谅的障碍。 From the print edition: Leaders |
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