![]() This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.īut now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.īefore the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.īut the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.
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