Link to my recent webinar hosted by eLIFE (ca. 60 min):

In letzter Zeit war ich zu Gast in einigen Podcasts, für Audiophile hier die links:

 

 

 

Deutschlandfunk Kultur

Wo Professor Zufall regiert  

Zu wenige Versuchspersonen, unsauber geplante Experimente, keine Replikation der Untersuchung: viele biomedizinische Studien haben Schwächen. So große, dass man stattdessen genauso gut eine Münze werfen könnte, meint der Neurologe Ulrich Dirnagl.

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/biomedizinische-studien-wo-professor-zufall-regiert.976.de.html?dram:article_id=458680#

7 min

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Podcast Spektrum – Wirkstoffradio (André Lampe und Bernd Rupp)

WSR019 Schlaganfall, Stroke Units und die Verantwortung der Forschung 

150 min!

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Podcast Kritisches Denken (Philip Barth, Andreas Blessing)

Episode 25 – Qualität in der Forschung

Im ersten Teil des Gesprächs mit Prof. Ulrich Dirnagl von der Charité Berlin sprechen wir über strukturelle Probleme in der Forschungslandschaft, die Reproduzierbarkeitskrise und den p-Wert. Details zur Episode

https://kritisches-denken-podcast.de/episode-25-qualitaet-in-der-forschung/

40 min

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Podcast Kritisches Denken (Philip Barth, Andreas Blessing)

Episode 26 – Mikrobiomforschung und andere Hype-Zyklen

In Teil 2 des Gesprächs mit Prof. Ulrich Dirnagl unterhalten wir uns über die Mikrobiomforschung und wie Hype-Zyklen in der Wissenschaft verlaufen.

https://kritisches-denken-podcast.de/episode-26-mikrobiomforschung-und-andere-hype-zyklen/

60 min

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Podcast Gesundheit Macht Politik

Ulrich Dirnagl | Forschung: This is an intergalactic emergency

https://gmp-podcast.de/blog/gmp053/

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And here’s a video cast from the European Academy of Neurology

EAN 2019: Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard Lecture – Interview with Prof. Ulrich Dirnagl

Damn! What an effort: Generation of a knockout mouse line, back crossing in background strain and litermates, all the genotyping. Followed by a plethora of experiments in a disease model: surgery, magnetic resonance imaging, histology, behavioral studies, and so on. Finally the result: No phenotype! The knockout mouse appears to be a mouse like any other. Not different from the wild type background strain. But wait, we rather need to phrase it like this: We did not find a statistically significant difference between knockout and wild type. So we cannot even conclude that wild type are like knowout mice, but rather: If there is a difference, it might be smaller than the detectable effect size, depended on sample size, error level (alpha and beta) and the variance of our results. But we had planned our experiments well:  The sample size was determined a priori, and chosen so that we would have been able to detect a difference on the order of one standard deviation. This is what statisticians call a Cohen’s d of 1, which is considered a substantial effect. We could not have done more animals than the  (34!), because of limited ressources, the duration of the PhD thesis, and the timing of the grant. But what now? Write a paper? Reporting a NULL result? How would this look like in a resume, besides, who cares about NULL results, and which reputable journal would publish them at all? Continue reading →

A study in this weeks Nature (Vrselja et al. ) has created an immediate media frenzy. Nature puts it like this: ‘Pig brains kept alive outside body for hours after death’ and ‘Revival of disembodied organs raises slew of ethical and legal questions about the nature of death and consciousness.’ The New York Times: ‘In a study that raises profound questions about the line between life and death, researchers have restored some cellular activity to brains removed from slaughtered pigs.; STAT: ‘The pigs were dead. But four hours later, scientists restored cellular functions in their brains’ etc.

That sounds spectacular. But if one reads the study (and the commentaries) is easy to spot that there are two main deficiencies: 1) The study lacks novelty, and 2) The assertion that it presents a relevant step towards restoring brain function after a prolonged interruption of cerebral blood flow  is not only exaggerated, but simply wrong. Continue reading →

‘Unfortunately, we have to inform you that after thorough review [YOUR FAVORITE FUNDING ORGANISATION] must reject your application’. Most of us know this sentence all to well, as most rejection letters of our grant applications contain it in a similar form. From a purely statistical point of view, we receive such letters quite frequently. In German biomedicine, the funding rates are between 5 and 25 %, depending on funder and program. Upon receiving a rejection we often feel personally offended. After all, we have put down our best ideas, often had already included some preliminary results and proposed experiments we had already conducted, even beautified the document with a lot of prose, and flattered the most important potential reviewers with strategically placed quotations, etc. And then the rejection! So we had to start over from the beginning, rewrite everything, submit it again, perhaps to another funding agency. This is how we spend a substantial fraction of our days at the office, if we don’t review applications of our colleagues. On average, scientists spend 40% of their time writing or reviewing applications. Continue reading →