> b) the 12 authors of that paper have probably put a bit of thought into the usefulness and efficacy of this kind of very early detection, and concluded it was worth reporting on their research
Nah. It's not how science is done. You fill a lot of paperwork to ask for money and then a lot of paperwork to ask for permision to use human, and after the study is finished you must publish whatever positive result you got. Otherwise you will never get more money, or will be fired, or your students will not finish their Ph.D., or never get a position.
My guess is that they actuallly think that it's a important topic and that it's an important new tool. Everyone thinks that thir own topic is important.
About the efficacy, it's an early study. They show that the method somewhat works and it may be a good idea to continue improving the method to get more accurate diagnosis, perhaps distingish the different types of cancer, or perhaps it's a dead end.
About the usefulness, it's more difficult to evaluate. It's a decition that should be made by a team with a brader vision that can analyze the alternatives and the cost of each one. The research team has always a narrow vision.
I agree that negative results are not published many times, but if they got some minimal positive result, I guess they will try to publish somewhere.
> Scientists at the University of Oxford studied blood samples from more than 44,000 people in the UK Biobank, including over 4,900 people who subsequently had a cancer diagnosis.
It looks like the kind of study that has to present a report after it's completed and adding a publushed paper in Nature Whatever is a huge win. Nobody is fired for publishing in Nature.
Nah. It's not how science is done. You fill a lot of paperwork to ask for money and then a lot of paperwork to ask for permision to use human, and after the study is finished you must publish whatever positive result you got. Otherwise you will never get more money, or will be fired, or your students will not finish their Ph.D., or never get a position.
My guess is that they actuallly think that it's a important topic and that it's an important new tool. Everyone thinks that thir own topic is important.
About the efficacy, it's an early study. They show that the method somewhat works and it may be a good idea to continue improving the method to get more accurate diagnosis, perhaps distingish the different types of cancer, or perhaps it's a dead end.
About the usefulness, it's more difficult to evaluate. It's a decition that should be made by a team with a brader vision that can analyze the alternatives and the cost of each one. The research team has always a narrow vision.