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The abrupt dismissal of the head of a Utah cancer center is causing backlash from its faculty—and its major philanthropic funder—in a struggle over the center's autonomy from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. And nearly 2000 researchers have signed a petition calling on the university to reverse its decision.
For 11 years, prominent cell biologist Mary Beckerle has headed the Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), which is based at the university but receives its funding largely from philanthropic donations, revenue from its cancer hospital, and grants from state and from the National institutes of Health. In an email to some clinical staff on Monday, university President David Pershing and Vivian Lee, senior vice president for health sciences, announced that Beckerle would step down "effective yesterday," but would "remain on faculty as a distinguished professor in biology." Beckerle, who has not responded to Science's request for comment, told The Salt Lake Tribune that she had learned of her dismissal in an email less than an hour earlier.
Details have been scant from the university, which also did not respond to a comment request. But Beckerle's colleagues contend that the move amounts to a hostile takeover by the university aimed at capturing the cancer clinic's revenue, and other prominent scientists are rallying unquestioningly around her.
Also at Deseret News. Change.org petition. University of Utah Health press release.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @07:06PM (2 children)
Your premise seems to be "science = proper analysis of data with statistics" or that using improper statistical approaches to data analysis seems to invalidate experiments as being science.
Science was done before scientists used statistics regularly. NHST was better than nothing, but "good shouldn't be the enemy of great" and "perfect shouldn't be the enemy of great".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @07:41PM (1 child)
No, NHST is not better than nothing. nNot learning statistics at all would be far, far superior to learning NHST.
The problem is that it reverses the logic of science. It has nothing to do with the statistics equations. Please read the Meehl paper that explains this very well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @08:14PM
The problem is that it reverses the logic of science
Possibly for psychology studies, but not necessarily for other fields. NHST is mainly used in biomedical research (which appears to be the field you studied) to show some weak evidence that the data presented is not simply the result of technical artifacts. NHST is better than showing a single "representative" biological replicate or deliberately reporting the best result (typical for %yield in synthesis papers). Even when people completely fuck-up NHST and use it on technical replicates, it is at least eliminating the data that can't be consistent enough for technical reasons.