onegoodmove

So basically I sit here with a big bag of standard tools from the world of evidence, and wait for stories to come along which allow me to deliver a 600 word lecture on them. Sit tight, this one’s slightly complicated. In America last week the papers went crazy: artificial blood products cause a 30% increase in deaths, and a 2.7-fold increase in heart attacks, according to a new meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There is, incidentally, a trial of these products still ongoing in the UK.

In many respects the first part of this story was similar to the antidepressants scandal: a large number of trials had been done, over a decade, but the results had not been published, languishing unseen in the FDA’s files. Many of the companies involved even declined to hand over data to the National Institutes for Health researchers doing the meta-analysis.

It is a chilly Tuesday night and outside the Dana Cafe in London a queue of young people spills on to the pavement. A glamorous woman with a walkie-talkie and clipboard guards the bar's door and turns away anyone who is not on the guest list.

The attraction is not the latest band, exclusive club or film screening, but a science lecture.

In addition to being an actor, game show host, and commercial pitchman for eye drops, Ben Stein is a lawyer. I assume, therefore, that he is an intelligent man. However, he is obviously in way over his head when it comes to science. Perhaps, as many intelligent people do, he overestimates his own knowledge.

This is a story that starts with a brilliant idealist and a great deal of money, so you may already guess it ends in recrimination and abject failure. But the interesting thing about the implosion of the one laptop per child (OLPC) project is that it teaches an important lesson to grownups, if not to the children who were meant to be its beneficiaries.