"First, do no harm."

[unixronin]

Or, not.

The General Medical Council ruled that Dr Andrew Wakefield, who claimed a link between the MMR jab and autism, also “failed in his duties as a responsible consultant”.

[...]

His 1998 research, based on 12 children, was published in the Lancet and is said to have done more damage than anything published in a scientific journal in living memory.

[...]

The charges against the trio run to 93 pages and include the allegation that Dr Wakefield failed to disclose to the Lancet that he had accepted £55,000 from the Legal Aid Board.  The money was allegedly for research to support legal action by parents who believed their children were harmed by MMR.

Step 1:  Create a false medical panic.

Step 2:  Rent yourself out to people looking for someone to blame for their kid's autism.

Step 3:  Profit!

(Pointer via brownkitty)

Comments

[ithildae]

I have begun to doubt that the science journals are any more accurate than Wikipedia. I have heard that science changes one funeral at a time. I know that there has always been politics in science. But the stuff we are getting fed as factual is getting further and further from the raw data. I remember my father telling me that he ended up doing some of his physics labs with a slide rule in college. Apparently, that is the norm for researchers also. That and very small samples to form statistically insignificant conclusions.

It seems that laws and sausages are not the only things it is best not to observe being made.