How predictive and productive is animal research?

It’s more than 20 years since Doug Altman wrote his scorching editorial in The BMJ on “the scandal of medical research” (doi:10.1136/bmj.308.6924.283). Earlier this year The BMJ ’s former editor Richard Smith summarised why the same editorial could be published today with little change (http://bit.ly/1rHnWbL), referencing the recent Lancet series on waste in medical research and John Ioannidis’s PLoS Medicine article entitled, “Why most published research findings are false.” The medical literature remains beset with academic and commercial biases caused by overinterpretation of small, poorly designed, and badly implemented studies, many of them erroneously or selectively reported or not reported at all. The result is an evidence base …