Jumping to conclusion (ch.6)- Jenaya P.

 I read chapter 6 of Rigor Mortis “Jumping to the conclusion” and I read about the ovarian cancer detector that was made and how it had eventually turned into a test. After reading this chapter I did research and according to Oasis of Hope Hospital, 1 out of 75 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer in their lifetime. An in 2002 excitement grow due to a very important announcement. Researchers at the Food and Drug Administration (or the FDA) and National Institute of Health (NIH) developed an ovarian cancer detector to help detect ovarian cancer. The creators of the detector were later brought on the TODAY Show. In the book it said and I quote “Instead of searching for one particular molecule as most labs do, this test looked for a board pattern, a protein spectrum. It seemed like the start of something big. Really big.”(pg.124)

And it was something big. Many scientists wondered how it was possible. But Mr. Braggerly wanted to see if the same pattern seen in the detector could also be seen in the data. He said, “We looked at it fairly extensively for a few months, and we couldn’t find the patterns that they were reporting.”(pg.124) After that announcement from Baggerly, things began to unfold other scientists started raising doubts due to lack of evidence shown. Thanks to Baggerly scientists wanted answers. But after doing some digging Baggerly found out that the data he had before had already been cleaned up and there was a significant difference between women with and women without ovarian cancer. But the data they shared was thrown away because it was said to be untrustworthy. He then placed a test one day for women with ovarian cancer and another day for the women without to gather data. What surprised me most in this chapter was that Baggerly tested out human people for his

data instead of finding out what went wrong in the data before and change the information to get results. In the book, he even said “The “ovarian cancer” test was really measuring nothing more than spurious signals from the machine.”(pg.125) So why test on people instead of going back and changing your results to get your answer. And then test on a few human examples. That’s just what I would do if I was in in his place. But after all of Baggerly test, he got his analysis and he did, get published in the paper by the New York Times after trying to get his analysis published by the Medical Journal. So after the FDA and NIH had created the detector Baggerly was the one to take it one step further.