Software incompetence (and more) lurks behind a cancer treatment trial

To provide additional context (the NYT article is fine, but doesn't give a sense of the technical issues with the study, or of how difficult/impossible it was to bring attention to those issues; the behavior of Duke seems particularly scandalous)...

If you have a few minutes, Baggerly's talk---on the "forensic bioinformatics" undertaken to pinpoint the study's flaws---is fascinating:

http://videolectures.net/cancerbioinformatics2010_baggerly_i...

The associated paper:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.1092

Recent small steps toward preventing similar problems in the future:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/reproducible-research/UipZ...