Dr. Ioannidis is a hero of mine. In fact, he’s a hero of many a scientist who has found him- or herself shaking their heads upon finding out how the contemporary scientific establishment functions.

He came to Montreal in October to give a public science talk on the lack of reproducibility in the scientific literature. I heard some negative feedback from non-scientists who reported that his talk was not always understandable to the uninitiated. Indeed, his spiel (minus the opening bit about the Greek poem) was aimed at scientists and was roughly the same I had heard him give to a roomful of physicians and researchers at the Jewish General Hospital months earlier.

Julia Belluz at MacLeans does a stand-up job of digesting the data he recently showed at the Harvard School of Public Health and making it accessible to all. Here’s an excerpt:

“In one of his studies