So it seems Andrew Wakefield is back in the news. As Phil Plait has described well, the man who has done more to undermine public health than any physician since Martini and Rodenwaldt has been given space in The Independent to accuse the British government of inadequate measles prevention. Because his rantings scared lots of parents off the MMR vaccine, and the NHS didn’t want to provide separate measles vaccines instead.
The pathological self-promoters you will have with you always, so there’s no real surprise there. But it got me to thinking about his future in British medical research. Because some denizens of less enlightened lands may not know how IMPACTFUL British research has become: The prime directive for state-sponsored research under the current government (though I think it started already under Labour) is “impact”, defined as
an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia
because academia is just a province of Faerie, not an actual part of the society or economy. In addition to impact being a crucial part of every grant proposal, and the postmortem on every grant after it’s completed, this definition will guide 20% of the scoring on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) just now getting underway, replacing the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) last conducted six years ago, because now instead of research being assessed, we agree that it’s all excellent but needs to be frameworked, or something.
So anyway, it’s noteworthy that BENEFIT is only one acceptable form of impact. Any change or effect gets you points for impact, rather in the way the bibliometric citation counting that prevails in many academic fields doesn’t distinguish between citations for your paper providing key insights that inspired follow-on research, and citations that point out yet another bone-headed mistake in the paper that has been confusing researchers and holding back the progress of the field.
What’s more, it’s not clear how anyone would evaluate whether those who benefit from the research are themselves providing a net benefit or harm to society. (Sorry, I mean, to the taxpayer. There’s no such thing as society.) Presumably no one will provide a support letter from bioterrorists, explaining how their headline-generating work would have been impossible without the groundbreaking research of Professor X, but someone like David Li could show evidence that his work formed the industry-wide basis for the multi-billion pound market in mortgage backed securities which (you may have heard) helped to crash the world economy. The fact that he might himself agree that his formula never should have been applied, that the bankers “misinterpreted and misused it“, and that “Very few people understand the essence of the model“, doesn’t detract from the benefit that derived to some people, at least in the short term, and even the worst recession in 75 years certainly counts as a “change in the economy”, demonstrating the IMPACT of the research.
With that in mind, I reveal the hitherto secret Wakefield Impact Case Study, titled “Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine characterisation of risk factors for Autism and Vaccination Policy”. We are confident that the massively impactful Wakefield will quickly be hired by a major research institution and showered with research grants. Continue reading “Total Impact: Wakefield edition”
Common Infirmities 