"high-risk, high-reward" science sounds great, until you suddenly have a replication crisis on your hands. Big, exciting results already attract more attention than good, careful, journeyman science, despite generally being, well, wrong.
That's an important thing to keep in mind, but it also seems like the replication crisis is being fuelled by a kind of risk averse attitude. Something like "if you want to get funding and have your career go well, you need to make sure you're regularly producing positive results". From that point of view, not only is ambitious research (working on the most important problems in a field) risky, but so is any research that might not produce positive results. The safe path for scientists is to churn out a load of low quality papers where they're already pretty sure in advance what results they expect to get. And the replication crisis is a natural result. Careful science is in a sense just as risky as ambitious science, and God help anyone trying to carefully work on a hard and important problem.
To be clear, I'm not blaming scientists too much for having this attitude. I think the surrounding incentives play a large part, in particular how bad the job security is for a lot of scientists. Probably a lot of the people who would be working carefully on risky things ended up not being able to get a job.
I'm in a similar place to the OP - I have a PhD in health science with R and Python experience (and a little hobby experience with TensorFlow and some AWS stuff). Is it worth doing kaggle competitions? I've heard mixed things - some people say companies ignore them, others say they're useful evidence on a CV. Thanks!
Do them if you're interested but I don't think they're that useful on a CV. If you win a competition, you'll obviously get some attention but just participating and putting it on your CV doesn't do much.
thanks - do you think there's anything obvious I might be missing coming from an academic background in terms of getting attention? I don't know how useful side projects really are, for instance (particularly vs things I've done as part of my research).
Birth rates have been declining in the West since the late 1950s/early 1960s. Of course it won't carry on forever, because there is a point where you must have children in order to survive. And survive is what people do best.
The FDA isn't immune to the same kind of corruption/conflicts of interest that impacts other federal agencies.
Scott Gottlieb worked at the FDA at a high level, before leaving for a stint in the private sector which included being a partner in a VC fund which invested in many medical startups. He left that to become the commissioner of the FDA under the previous administration. Gottlieb is currently on the board of Pfizer, and has relationships with several other companies in the pharma space.
It's not insane to think this person still has sway with people who are working within the FDA and are considering a move to the private sector.
Doesn't matter. The USA is the key market for pharmaceuticals because of the outrageous prices that can be charged there. Example: Mylan charges $600 for an EpiPen that's $100 in other parts of the world, for no other reason than they can.
If a company wanted to, they could certainly use the online social media polarisation to poison any discussion.
Any discussion of the validity of Ivermectin as a COVID treatment is now "political", in the sense that Team Red thinks that its a gift from god, and Team Blue thinks any consideration of it is anti-science stupidity.
And since there is a strong correlation between Team Blue and the vocal science community, in a sense someone could drive consensus about a drug to make and studies into Ivermectin political instead of evidence-based - because who wants their university peers to think they are Team Red instead of Team Blue.
This isn't quite true - Scotland's income tax rates are slightly different from the rest of the UK's, so residence inside or outside Scotland is relevant.
But that’s the same now. Work in Carlisle and live in Dumfries and you get a Scottish tax code. Work in Dumfries and live in Carlisle and you get an English one.
