> Between them, these 18 genes have been the subject of more than 1,000 research papers, on depression alone. And for what? If the new study is right, these genes have nothing to do with depression.
The article doesn't actually say anything about what these 1000 research papers actually claimed to show. It's entirely possible that most of them were negative results, there's no way to tell from the text of the article. It strongly implies that this is the case, but it doesn't actually say so. This is a significant omission for an article whose thesis is that these 1000 papers constituted a "house of cards."
[UPDATE]
"Sometimes the gene was linked to depression; sometimes it wasn’t. And crucially, the better the methods, the less likely he was to see such a link."
Seems to me like this is science working exactly as it is supposed to (except for the possible suppression of earlier negative results, but that's a known broad problem that has nothing to do with this particular gene study).
It worked as it was supposed to...eventually. Instead of double-checking the initial results, hundreds of research papers by many research teams looked into questions that would be very important, if the genes in question were connected to depression.
Sure, it is great that it's not (quite) religious dogma, and it eventually gets revisited. But, a couple decades worth of work and ~1000 research papers, many of which took place AFTER the earlier 2005 paper that called into question the link to depression, is by no means what we should shoot for.
More fundamentally, there was nothing in the system that motivated anyone to do replication of the original link. The problem is not that the original link turned out to be spurious, and it's not that anyone did anything unethical. More worrisomely, nobody appears to have done anything unethical, but because of the systemic incentives for research grants, tenure, etc., replication of the foundational result wasn't attempted in a serious enough way until many times that much work had been done on something spurious.
The article doesn't actually say anything about what these 1000 research papers actually claimed to show. It's entirely possible that most of them were negative results, there's no way to tell from the text of the article. It strongly implies that this is the case, but it doesn't actually say so. This is a significant omission for an article whose thesis is that these 1000 papers constituted a "house of cards."
[UPDATE]
"Sometimes the gene was linked to depression; sometimes it wasn’t. And crucially, the better the methods, the less likely he was to see such a link."
Seems to me like this is science working exactly as it is supposed to (except for the possible suppression of earlier negative results, but that's a known broad problem that has nothing to do with this particular gene study).