Truthiness

C. Glenn Begley, who is chief scientific officer at TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals, described an experience he had while at Amgen, another drug company. He and his colleagues could not replicate 47 of 53 landmark papers about cancer. Some of the results could not be reproduced even with the help of the original scientists working in their own labs. Given what is at stake, it seems like a moral failing that the titles of the papers were not revealed. That was forbidden, we’re told, by confidentiality agreements imposed by the labs. (nyt)

...identity politics of the 1970s through the 1990s stressed the import of gay identity and community. Unsurprisingly, histories generated during that time privileged and, in part, produced identity and community in prior eras. My call today for a queer history, to be focused upon the ever-changing relationship of normalcy to deviancy, happens alongside a contemporary focus on queer desire over gay identity. A deeply historicist project thus situates in time not only the object of study but also the conductor of the study. Both the history and the historian must be historicised. We should ask not only what do we study, but who are we who study? Who are we in relationship to what we study? (howard)

It was not that it was all right to be a lesbian because there had been lesbians in the past. Nor was it that what I was feeling was all right because it was not “homosexuality.” Rather, it was that our modern categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality (and even bisexuality) are not complex enough to capture the slippery reality of love and desire. I seized upon this article because Smith-Rosenberg’s vision of a world in which love and sexuality had no easy relation to sexual identity made sense to me, unsure as I was if I yet merited the label “lesbian.” And though the woman I fell in love with is now married to a man and I happily identify as a lesbian, I do not take that to mean those were the only possible outcomes. (rupp)