SCIENCE AS A RACKET: “It’s hopeless,” the prospect of reforming cancer trials. “The most common errors in cancer trials work to ensure that the data are not actually applicable to average Americans. Over the last 10 years, we have done work showing many trials lack control arms, use inferior controls, measure unreliable endpoints, have the inappropriate use of crossover, poor post protocol care or improper drug dosing.”

In the words of evolutionary biologist Thomas Ray, every successful system accumulates parasites. And American science has been successful enough, long enough, to have accumulated a very serious parasitic load.