“No thank you. We don’t want to share our samples.” – Leslie O.

Hello, I am back. I honestly understood half of chapter seven from Rigor Mortis. I read the chapter twice, and I understood somethings and I would have said the same thing as Murphy in page 156, “There’s a lot of good things going on, and I look at all this and say, ‘Oh my God, why aren’t these people working together?'” That was my exact reaction after reading chapter seven.

“Oh yes! I found something! Oh wait, that wasn’t even my goal.” What I understood from this chapter was that almost every scientist forgets their hypothesis. They are doing their experiments and like eight years pass by and they find something, and they realize that what they found wasn’t even the point of their experiment or hypothesis. Then some scientists, or actually every single scientist, don’t publish their findings correctly. “The Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 requires scientists running clinical trials on potential new drugs or devices to register their hypotheses in advance in a federal repository called ClinicalTrials.gov, set up by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2009. This law has another important salutary effect: some drug companies had the habit of simply not publishing studies if the results were not favorable to the drug they were investigating.” (page 147) That quote has so much information, for example, in 2009 scientists were required to register their hypothesis. I went to Clinical Trials because I got curious, and did you know that the database has 250,710 studies in America and in 200 other countries, I actually imagined there would be many more studies that even a website couldn’t keep track of. Maybe it means that some scientists don’t actually register their experiments.

When I was little, up to now, I always wondered how scientists didn’t retest the same hypothesis other scientist from around the world would have tested. “What’s best for moving science forward isn’t necessarily best for a researcher’s career.” (page 154) I realized that scientists don’t like publishing their findings unless they have finished because other scientists could be doing the same experiment and they know what you are doing, and they will experience what Salzburg from Johns Hopkins University experienced. Salzburg was being a good scientists and publishing his findings but some competitors from Sweden were also doing the same thing, they were watching his every move and when Salzburg was so close, the Europeans gave Nature their work to publish first. (pages 152-154) I would have been so mad and so sad, i kind of understand why some scientists don’t share their work but if they really wanted to go into the medical field to help people then they shouldn’t care who finds the cure first.