(Well, everything but the Corona vaccine…)
How does every study end?
A mealy-mouthed conclusion, good enough for media headlines and excerpts. And then: “However, there were certain constraints… Conclusion: There is an urgent need for further studies like this one.”
In other words, give us more money!
Scientists are funded by taxes. This is how “science” continues.
Wikipedia has a brief article on this phenomenon.
An excerpt:
A 2004 metareview by the Cochrane collaboration of their own systematic medical reviews found that 93% of the reviews studied made indiscriminate FRIN-like statements, reducing their ability to guide future research. The presence of FRIN had no correlation with the strength of the evidence against the medical intervention. Authors who thought a treatment was useless were just as likely to recommend researching it further.Indeed, authors may recommend “further research” when, given the existing evidence, further research would be extremely unlikely to be approved by an ethics committee.… Trish Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, argues that FRIN is often used as a way in which a “[l]ack of hard evidence to support the original hypothesis gets reframed as evidence that investment efforts need to be redoubled”, and a way to avoid upsetting hopes and vested interests. She has also described FRIN as “an indicator that serious scholarly thinking on the topic has ceased”, saying that “it is almost never the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from a set of negative, ambiguous, incomplete or contradictory data.”
Not to mention the asked-for research is never the lonely thoughtfulness of a Tesla, but ten thousand blooming wasteful experiments (per Nikola Tesla’s criticism of Thomas Edison’s showy scatter-shot approach), or, even worse, catered symposiums and the like.
If anything, we need private science funding!