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The Scientific Approach
A Layperson's Guide
Introduction: The Long Road to Scientific Discovery
When it comes to scientific research, the public wants results and we want them fast. This is especially true of research on chronic or fatal human diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and Parkinson’s, which affect millions of people in the United States alone. Because the public loves good news, the media is quick to report stories involving major scientific breakthroughs (or what appear to be). On June 16, 2006, for example, the Canadian press released an article entitled “Canadians cure Huntington’s disease in modified mice.”
As I learned firsthand this summer as an intern at Dr. Marcy MacDonald’s Huntington’s disease (HD) laboratory in the Center for Human Genetic Research at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, the disease is far from cured, even in mice. In fact, the research community is still years, perhaps decades, away from finding drug treatments that target the geneticmutation whose deleterious effects lead to HD, a neurological disorder with symptoms that typically begin in middle age. HD is termed “neurodegenerative” because it involves a progressive loss of nerve cells in the brain. The disease affects men and women alike, occurring at a rate of about one in every 10,000 in most Western countries.
While science journalism is not, for the most part, intentionally fraudulent or misleading, it sometimes gives people the wrong impression about scientific findings by the way it interprets the data from recent articles in science journals like Cell and Human Molecular Genetics. When the Canadian scientists reported that they had inhibited an enzyme that cleaves, or cuts, the mutated HD protein (huntingtin) in mice, thus preventing the degeneration of the nerve cells in the brain, the press trumpeted it as a cure.
When the media takes such leaps or oversimplifies a complex, highly nuanced finding, it presents a skewed picture of the actual process of scientific research and discovery. In reality, the scientific method—that is, the process of empirical investigation into the validity or invalidity of a scientific claim or hypothesis—relies on replication and critical testing of each new finding, which takes a considerable amount of time. Not only does it require patience from both the scientists and the public, but it also requires a great deal of intensive effort that includes collaboration between research teams in different parts of the country and around the world.
Scientists rarely work alone or in isolation. To do so would be highly inefficient, especially since one scientist or group of scientists does not have expertise in every skill necessary to carry out an entire large experiment from start to finish. When teams of scientists work together and share ideas and materials (such as cell lines, which the MacDonald lab frequently sends to other labs), they are able to produce results in less time. However, “less time” does not mean instantaneously; collaborative work, while certainly more efficient than solitary work, still requires many years of sustained effort to find results that translate into good news for disease sufferers.
Although the scientific community values collaboration, it does not necessarily frown upon competition. Competition to test new ideas, to try and “knock them out of the ring,” is built into the scientific method (described later in The Scientific Method) and is, in a manner of speaking, one hallmark of the scientific endeavor.
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