The Boston Globe has published the OpEd piece Unverified science: Studies that can’t be replicated create a problem with trust — and funds.  The fortuitous publication of this piece this morning gives me a place to comment with the letter to the editor that I composed in my mind last night while trying to go to sleep.

If the editors of The Boston Globe read this piece, they would immediately stop publishing the series “Uncommon Knowledge”.

I imagine the quandary of the people putting together such a column.  They must search for results that are unexpected, counter-intuitive, and surprising.  After an item meets these criteria, I wonder if anybody asks whether this is good science, repeatable, the conclusions fit the data, and are the most probable explanation of the data. In other words, could the experiment they describe possibly measure the effect they were trying to study?

I’d rather see a series with a headline that concentrated on items that were significant, backed by well run studies, with repeatable results that were an accurate measure of the effect being  studied.

The “Uncommon Knowledge” series cannot be a good way to support science which is one of the most important enterprises of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.