A nice reminder from Eula Biss (via On Immunity: An Inoculation) that science is a series of building blocks, with small tests and then bigger ones to see if each brick helps us reach higher and see farther.
Science is, as scientists like to say, “self-correcting,” meaning that errors in preliminary studies are, ideally, revealed in subsequent studies. One of the primary principles of the scientific method is that the results of a study must be reproducible. Until the results of a small study are duplicated in a larger study, they are little more than a suggestion for further research. Most studies are not incredibly meaningful on their own, but gain or lose meaning form the work that has been done around them… This doesn’t mean that published research should be disregarded but that, as John Ioannidis concludes, “what matters is the totally of the evidence” (p. 133)…
Thinking of our knowledge as a body suggests the harm that can be done when one part of that body is torn from its context. Quite a bit of this sort of dismemberment goes on in discussions about vaccination, when individual studies are often used to support positions or ideas that are not supported by the body as a whole… When one is investigating scientific evidence, on must consider the full body of information (p. 135).
Heather E. Lanthorn 