Book Review: “Rigor Mortis” by Richard Harris

Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions
Richard Harris
Basic Books (April 4, 2017)

15 years in the foundations of physics taught me little about the universe and much about human behavior. I eventually poured my frustration into a book, which was published a few months ago under the title “Lost in Math” and which documents that bad methodologies survive in scientific communities simply because they enable the continued production of papers.

While the foundations of physics are the research area that I am personally most interested in, its lack of progress arguably has limited societal relevance. Who really cares if we will eventually manage to quantize gravity. If our fruitless attempts at least entertain the masses, maybe that’s justification enough to finance string theorists.

But the same problems exist in other research areas, and in some cases lives are at stake. In his book “Rigor Mortis,” the US-American science journalist Richard Harris has a close look at what is going on in biomedicine and drug development. You may think that my experience with physicists should have warned me, but really I had no idea.

While I follow the popular science literature on drug development to some extent, it is certainly not a topic that I know a lot about. And those popular science accounts tend to be celebrations of the supposedly great breakthroughs, most of which we never hear of again. I was under the impression that since in the life sciences you can at least experimentally check hypotheses, it can’t possibly be as bad as in the foundation of physics. Well, I was wrong.

In “Rigor Mortis,” Harris goes through the various kinds of flawed scientific methodologies that have spread in those research communities. Poor experimental design, hypothesis-fishing, sloppy statistics, mislabeled cell-lines, contaminated but still used antibodies, the abundance of irreproducible results, outright fraud and misconduct, and long-retracted zombie-papers that continue to be cited nevertheless. No longer do I wonder why the development of new drugs has basically stalled and why the alleged breakthrough discoveries never pan out.

Harris makes some efforts to convince the reader that the problem has been recognized and some people try to do something about it. While I appreciate the attempted optimism, that’s lipstick on a pig. Yes, there have been initiatives for this and that, and some of those have indeed partly addressed a specific problem. For example, requiring researchers to pre-register trials prevents them from later changing the hypothesis they were testing. But the overarching problem that the organization of scientific research is inefficient to the point of choking progress still exists and no one is doing anything about it.

Harris book is thankfully short on the actual research studies, where I say “thankfully” because I get lost easily in elaborations about molecules with unpronounceable names and 20 different enzymes that may or may not be doing this or that. For me any article about drug development come down to “this thing fits into that thing and we hope it will have this effect.” Harris does nothing of that sort and instead focuses on the way research is pursued.

I was also relieved to find that Harris largely spares the reader dreadful stories about patients who succumbed to their illness after long suffering. It’s not that I think those stories shouldn’t be told, they have their place, but personally I would prefer if popular science articles stayed clear of them. For me it’s a reason not to read an article if I have to fear someone may die in the next paragraph.

Harris interviewed a few people whose voices appear in some places. His writing is clean and clear and easy to follow, which is to say he writes better than I, damn. It’s not a long book, but it’s full with information, and it’s scary. You should read it.