Just 7% of studies that do a preliminary study on humans actually get through phase 3 and get approved for use. This is before even the preliminary point, its a tooth (or even a tooth analogue) in a petri dish. No idea if the material will be safe in a human mouth yet.

There is a lot of hyping of results in medicine papers in general but its not really their fault. The entire academic world is being forced to publish or die as governments look to measure results from the science they instead get what is measured and everyone has to embellish the importance of what they found and always find positive results.

Despite how obtuse the current administration views are, this has been true for decades. The churn of new papers and hype around medicine/biotech is nothing new.

Says nothing about endemic reproducibility crisis of the social sciences.

Since student loans have been basically guaranteed (bankruptcies can’t erase student loan obligations, in an attempt to push rates lower) and tuition steeply rose, academic institutions’ ratio of administrators to students has skyrocketed to a bureaucratic mess, leading to a flywheel of higher education costs and incentivizing research for money’s sake over impact to the field.

Real impact would be reproducing notoriously iffy studies, but that doesn’t bring in the dollars.

> The entire academic world is being forced to publish or die as governments look to measure results from the science they instead get what is measured and everyone has to embellish the importance of what they found and always find positive results.

It sounds like they're running it like a business.

Is there a way I can search for the studies that recently got approved? Somehow setup an alert for it?

Publish or perish is more about status & careerism within academia than any sort of govt forcing function. If you don't publish, you are invisible to your peers and your career stagnates, regardless of the govt funding environment.

It is entirely their fault. If no one agrees to do performative research, the problem will be solved.

The problem is some people prefer an academic lifestyle in exchange for doing performative research.

Yes there are other actors eg politicians demanding performative productivity, but mostly it’s the inmates running the asylum.

Academia is one failed western institution amongst many, and those failures are ultimately directed by the actions of the individuals that comprise those institutions.

KPIism is the death knell of modern society. In the 90s and 2000s this mantra of "measure and improve" took hold like a virus. It is in all instances I observe a rats race where everybody just starts to look for the cheat-codes instead of "doing-the-right-thing".

Arguably America is the pinnacle of this right now, where (many) politicians and (many) business leaders now feel justified do whatever's legal just to score points. I would argue this type of thinking was birthed in the UK though under Thatcher who as a first step removed the general trust in (civil servants in her case) your fellow human beings. Blair then came up to replace that trust with KPIs.

We need to get back to a world where we trust people to do the right thing - without measuring their success in short-term KPIs.