Bad science writing is painful

But so is bad science.

Seriously, I hand wave a lot of the bad science I see as it being medical doctors trying to do preclinical studies. However, there are certain types of studies that really really highlight either a) the laxness of more oncology based journals with regard to immunology/epigenetic studies and/or b) the laziness of the experimenters. Because the paper I am having to annotate -- there's no way this would get into a higher tier immunology only journal.

I mean, it's interesting to see that the drug has different transcriptional effects in the malignant cell vs the T cell, but they aren't showing if this is due to malignancy or the lineage since they don't compare the malignant cell to normal B cells. *head desk* And then they've gone through emphaszing that the drug is affecting 1 gene to cause the changes in cytokine production etc, and then they finish by showing that oh, by the way, the combo treatment that alters this gene expression also affects proliferation of both t cells and the malignant cell....which leads me to say that I doubt this is ALL due to the 1 suppressor of cytokine signaling gene IMO.

And this isn't even getting into the fact that trying to figure out their actual experimental conditions is like reading a haiku half the time. And no, they can't hide behind being foreign because all the labs involved in this study are US based. And not just any centers, but Dana Farber for Pete's sake.

Now I remember why translational science in grad school used to make me want to bang my head.