Because of the aggressiveness of a disease, its stage when detected and/or the requirement that patients enrolled in clinical trials not simultaneously pursue multiple treatments "patients with progressive terminal illness may have just one shot at an unproven but promising treatment." Too often their last desperate shots are wasted on treatments that had no hope of success in the first place. Two new comment pieces in Nature highlight the extent of the problem.

In Preclinical research: Make mouse studies work, Steve Perrin demonstrates that just like cancer patients, ALS/Lou Gehrigs' patients are betting their lives on treatments that showed great promise in lab animals only to find that they do no good in humans. So why are 80% of these treatments failing? It's not a story of mice and men. It's a story of bureaucratic science. Of going through the motions. Of just turning the crank. And of never, ever, daring to critique your methods lest you find, to take one example, that the reason your exciting new ALS treatment works so well in mice is because your mice didn't have ALS to begin with - you having unwittingly bred the propensity to develop it out of your lab animals.

Then read Misleading mouse studies waste medical resources. It continues the story of how drugs that should have been discovered to be useless in mice instead made their way into clinical trials where they became false promises on which thousands of ALS patients and their families have pinned their hopes.

We hope those courts that have bought into the idea that reliable scientific knowledge can be gained without the need for testing and replication are paying attention.