Too bad he didn’t land in the end zone-he got there enough in his playing days. Sharpe landed near the 10-yard line by the south end zone at Invesco Field before unhooking his harness and waving to the cheering crowd shortly before kickoff. “You open your eyes and you’re like, ‘I’m OK,'” Sharpe said. The instructor screamed “Go” and, gulp, off they tumbled out of the plane. The door of the plane flew open, and his heart began racing. Mess with it at your own risk.Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close MenuĪbout 12,000 feet up, his hands began to sweat. They referred to Newton's classic 1687 paper establishing the law of gravity. "Our greatest accomplishment from all of this was we felt very good that we were able to cite Sir Isaac Newton in the paper," he says. In fact, the paper acknowledges that the research team members cracked themselves up so much that "all authors suffered substantial abdominal discomfort from laughter." "They thought that a trial conducted in this manner could not lead to scientifically valid evidence," he said. They chose one in Sri Lanka to reduce the risk that it would be discovered in advance, spoiling the joke. He also savors some of the more subtle lessons buried in the paper.įor example, the scientists attempted to submit it to a government registry of research studies, which is required for many studies involving human subjects. Yeh is pleased to see that the fun he had with his colleagues is turning into a teaching tool. "It will be unforgettable," she says - far better than assigning a straight-ahead scientific study. She plans to give this paper to her students with a straight face and see how long it takes for them to get the deeper points about scientific methodology buried in this absurd experiment. She says like a lot of research, its results are accurate as far as they go, but "the results can only be generalized to situations where people jump out of an aircraft within a few feet above the ground." Janssens was delighted to come across the paper on Twitter. "I know that people often don't look detailed enough into what is being investigated to know how to interpret the results of a trial," says Cecile Janssens, an epidemiology professor at Emory University. Scientists often read just the conclusion of a study and then draw their own conclusions that are far more sweeping than are justified by the actual findings. "It's a little bit of a parable, to say we have to look at the fine print, we have to understand the context in which research is designed and conducted to really properly interpret the results," Yeh says. The study's findings were published in the traditionally lighthearted Christmas issue of the medical journal, BMJ. This research paper carried that idea to the ridiculous extreme. It's far too easy for scientists who have already anticipated the outcome of their research to cherry-pick patients and circumstances to achieve the results they expect to see. Shots - Health News Drugs That Work In Mice Often Fail When Tried In Peopleīut something like this happens in everyday medical research. In all, 23 people agreed to be randomly given either a backpack or a parachute and then to jump from a biplane on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts or from a helicopter in Michigan. The scientists had much better success asking members of their own research teams from Harvard, University of California, Los Angeles (Where Yeh's brother is a surgery professor), and University of Michigan (where a buddy works) about volunteering to participate in the experiment on other aircraft. Only a few people said yes to this outrageous invitation, and they were excluded for reasons of questionable mental health. "We'd strike up a conversation and say, 'Would you be willing to be randomized in a study where you had a 50 percent chance of jumping out of this airplane with - versus without - a parachute?' " Yeh says. They started by talking to their seatmates on airliners. He and his colleagues would actually attempt the parachute study to make a few choice points about the potential pitfalls of research shortcuts. Cardiologist Robert Yeh, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, got a wicked idea one day.
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