Let's take a dynamic, adaptive ecology (cancer) and while paying lip service to its complexity actually study it like a static system.1 Let's take a chronic, degenerative disease of aging (Parkinson's) and study it in healthy young rodents given an acute injury. Let's ignore that we know that health and disease are processes with complicated interdependencies and then wonder why our models fail to be predictive. And let's keep doing what we do even when failure is readily predicted because we are not willing to ask ourselves tough questions and challenge our assumptions. And once the failures become too numerous and too public to ignore, let's acknowledge our shortcomings and propose a new 40-year research agenda based on what we've known all along. Something has gone terribly awry.
Susan Fitzpatrick
James S. McDonnell Foundation
St. Louis, Mo.
susan@jsmf.org
Steven Wiley bemoans the fact that many authors cite a pertinent review ...
