In "A Fungus Among Us", I related the tale of Science magazine's self-heralded publication of Tulane University research on synergism of combinations of synthetic estrogens. This research helped enact the environmental estrogen scare into U.S. law.
But then the bubble burst. Scientists at Texas A&M University, Duke University and the National Institute of Health Sciences reported to Science they could not replicate Tulane's results. Without anything approaching the fanfare used to proclaim the research in the first place, Science published (in the back of the magazine) the brief letter from Texas A&M et al.
The Texas A&M et al. report put the Tulane University research in the category of junk science. After all, a basic tenet of the scientific method is that experimental results should be capable of being independently replicated.
Now to add insult upon injury, researchers from the U.K. have also failed to replicate the Tulane research. Ashby et al. report in Nature that
Our results do not support the assertion that synergism between estrogens is likely to present a major human or wildlife health concern.
I guess Science just couldn't fool Mother Nature.
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